Hart, William, Suh, Kyunghee, & Oh, Yeonglim. 2017. “OK in Emergency Dispatch Encounters”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(2), 1~28. This paper investigates the discourse marker OK in 911 emergency calls, paying special attention to how its use is embedded in the context of the request-offer sequence through which the caller and the dispatcher display distinctive orientations in terms of goals, rights, and responsibilities. In line with previous research, it was found that the use of this marker displays multifunctionality, which for callers is manifested in the function OK not only as a response token but also as an affiliative signal of cooperation in the acknowledgment and acceptance of directives and updates on the status of the emergency response. For dispatchers, this multifunctionality is found in the activation of a bidirectional looking function of the marker which orients backward in acknowledgment of information elicited and provided in previous turns, while simultaneously orienting forward in anticipation of an impending directive, request for information, or status update in the turn that follows.

Suh, Kyunghee. 2014. Pulling off Being Both Adversarial and Neutralistic: The case of Korean News Interview. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). This study analyzes how a journalist can design his question to strike a balance between two competing journalistic norms-neutrality and adversarialness-within the framework of conversation analysis. An analysis of the three news interview segments in JTBC News 9 reveals that the interviewer, Seok-hee Sohn, resorts to the extensive use of prefaced questions. These prefaced questions depict the third person-attributed statements in a way that distances Sohn from his more overtly opinionated remarks. The use of quotation from others serves a dual function: it enables the interviewer to express adversarial criticism of his guests, while maintaining a formally neutralistic posture. Yet this strategy is also employed to give the interviewee the chance to justify him/herself. Particular attention should be given to the observation that Sohn deliberately refrains from asking questions after revealing sensitive details about the interviewee. The interviewer sometimes implicitly voices his own adversarial stance even in a seemingly neutralistic question, thereby showing how the interviewer can function as a ‘devil's advocate’ in a news interview. The question design examined in this study suggests that innovation in question design and rhetoric in news interviews can reflect changes in social and political attitudes, norms, and behavior.