Kim, Kyu-hyun. (2023). “Question Tags in Korean Conversation: Displaying and Soliciting Empathy for Managing Delicate Action”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 31(4), 149-173. From the perspective of conversation analysis, this study analyzes utterances formatted with a question tag constructed as the tag-type clause kuci, “Isn’t it?.” Based on an examination of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, it is argued that question tags, though generally intended to be a recipiency-mobilizing resource, serve primarily as a resource for empathy display and are geared toward retroactively managing the various “delicate” actions that their host utterance implements. Formulated as post-predicate elements, their use indicates the speaker’s trust that the recipient will provide an affiliative response by sharing the empathic stance exhibited in their host utterance. The kuci-speaker’s orientation toward soliciting the recipient’s affiliative uptake is frequently reciprocated by the recipient, who registers the “delicate character” of the kuci-marked utterance’s action by producing variously “nuanced” responses, for example, in a way that is empathically other-attentive, obliquely affiliative, or mildly resistant.

From a conversation-analytic perspective, this paper analyzes the “committal” suffixes ci and cianha used as “pseudo-tags” in Korean conversation, which render the utterance they mark a request for confirmation (RfC) formatted in the form of a polar declarative question. The focus is given to examining differences ci and cianha as constitutive of mutually related but distinct forms of RfC, particularly in terms of the ways in which the confirmable is formulated and intersubjective understanding is solicited and negotiated. It is proposed that the RfC formatted with the pseudo-tag ci indexes the speaker’s orientation towards having the recipient help him/her “raise commitment” to the factually ascertainable character of shared information. Its use organizes recipiency in such a way that the recipient’s confirmation is solicited collusively. The RfC formatted with cianha, by contrast, furnishes the speaker with a discursive resource for engaging the recipient in a negotiatory process, prodding him/her to raise his/her “momentarily latent” commitment. With the confirmable grounded in general/shared knowledge, the use of cianha has the import of organizing a range of “attendant activities”, such as appeasing, whining, rebuking, etc.

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.

This paper analyzes the difference between nun and ka from an interactional perspective in terms of the practice of giving distinct types of 'focus' to the referent they mark. From a conversation-analytic perspective, Kim's (1990) analysis that nun and ka index the speaker-relevant focus and the event-relevant focus respectively is further elaborated on, with systematic attention being paid to 'sequential,' rather than 'cognitive,' aspects of how the referent is highlighted in the context of dealing with the prior talk and projecting sequential trajectories that favor distinct types of uptake. Nun is shown to be embedded in the context where the speaker orients himself/herself to problematizing and counteracting the interlocutor's action in the prior context, with the consequence that the interlocutor is solicited to make a decision and take a position vis-a-vis the speaker's action, preferably in the direction of aligning with it. The upshot of the focus-giving practice involving nun is characterized as a process by which the speaker's display of subjective and evaluative stance indexed by nun is empirically grounded by facts putatively observed by the speaker. The use of ka, in contrast, does not necessitate such a process of modulating the speaker's subjectivity. The focus-giving practice involving ka is geared towards highlighting the referent per se, with any agenda it projectively proposes being limited to the factual import that the referent has towards the event/state of affairs it relates to. That the interlocutor orients to the ka-marked referent in such a straightforward and non-motivated fashion is demonstrated by his/her often successful attempt at collaborative completion of the ka-utterance in-progress.

Kim, Kyu-hyun. 2004. A Conversation Analysis of Korean Sentence-Ending Modal Suffixes -ney, -kwun(a), and -ta: Noticing as a Social Action. Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 12(1). Drawing upon H. S. Lee's (1993) cognitively-oriented research on the functions of three sentence-ending modal suffixes in Korean that are used to express newly perceived information, -ney, -kwun(a), and -ta, this study analyzes the distinct meanings of these suffixes from a conversation-analytic perspective (Sacks et al. 1974). The suffix -ney is used in the context in which the speaker notices a referent/event and makes an assessment on the spot in such a way that the speaker's stance displayed through the action is formulated as something that is to be immediately oriented to and contingently taken up by the hearer. In contrast, the suffix -kwun(a) is used when the speaker is mainly oriented to displaying a stance congruent with the prior talk. The action it organizes is often limited to acknowledging a point of the prior talk or having the hearer acknowledge the speaker's observation, often with a salient topic-curtailing and sequence-terminating import. The suffix -ta tends to orient the hearer to the next stage of the speaker's action (e.g., suggestion, warning, offer, etc.) to whose directive force the hearer is variably implicated as a beneficiary/facilitator. The interactional account offered in this paper is shown to complement Lee's cognitive account, with emphasis placed on examining the ways in which these suffixes are used as resources for organizing distinct types of social action.

Molecular genetic markers have been widely used as powerful tools for analyzing the genome. In particular, SSR markers have practical applications in breeding systems because they can be used in high-throughput analyses for genetic mapping, heritable diversity testing, purity analysis, and marker-assisted selection. Currently, due to technical advances in DNA sequencing, large sequence databases are available for large-scale SSR mining and marker development. Here, we describe an automated method, the SSR Finder program, for SSR discovery in the onion sequence database, and primer design for amplifying the detected SSRs. A total of 1,049 SSR primers were obtained for genetic purity testing, and 100 SSR sets were analyzed in 14 bulb onion breeding lines using clustering analysis. A total of 20 selected markers from screening of all 1,049 SSR primers, were finally applied for genetic purity testing in three breeding lines, NW1, NW9, and NW10. The initial tests showed that 15%, 71%, and 97% of individuals within NW1, NW9, and NW10, respectively, were genetically homogeneous. These markers produced using the SSR Finder will be useful for investigating the genetic purity of onion breeding lines.