Kim, Kyu-hyun. 2016. “The Topic Marker -Nun as an Interactional Resource: Domain Shifting as Stance-Managing Practice”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 24(3). 65~94. From the conversation-analytic perspective, this paper examines the interactional meaning of -nun with reference to its constitutive role of organizing assessment activities in naturally occurring conversations. -Nun is analyzed as a grammatical resource deployed for ‘shifting’ the domain whose relevancies are transiently invoked as a new assessable being brought up, or as delimiting the scope of valency to be accorded the assessable. The domain-shifting makes relevant a new set of stance-taking possibilities, which is done in an ‘other-attentive’ way; the shift is made either towards minimizing stance difference and promoting rapport among the participants in the context of disagreement, or towards further elaborating stance alignment what agreement is already in place. The ‘other-attentive’ orientation that the nun-speaker displays in managing his/her stance vis-à-vis the other’s is countervailed by his/her epistemic claim about the invoked domain, whose valency is additionally modulated by sentence-ending suffixes (SESs). The domain-shifting practice, mediated by -nun, draws upon membership categorization work as its organizational basis. Tied to the categories or category-bound features invoked in the prior context, different aspects or types of the assessable, marked by -nun, are transiently brought up as part of a contrastive device. This practice furnishes the speaker with a resource for formulating his/her action as an ‘affiliative’ (though not necessarily ‘aligning’) move geared towards managing stance and face as a collaborative interactional business.

• Kyu-hyun Kim(Kyung Hee University) | 김규현