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, Hyesook. 2014. Corpus-based Study on Gender Differences in the Functions of English Tag Questions. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). This study examines gender differences, focusing on the functions of English tag questions using three social variables: age, education, and private/public situations. This research is a corpus-based study which used 753 tag questions extracted from the British component of International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). This paper is the sequel to Kim Hye-Sook(2010), which examined gender differences in the frequency of tag usage. In this present study attention was turned to functions of tag questions to examine whether the gender differences in the tag usage were related to different tag functions. The four functions considered in the study were informational, facilitating, softening and challenging(cf., Holmes 1995; Tottie & Hoffmann 2006). The 753 tags were categorized into those four functions by a native speaker of British English. The tags used by the British men and women in the ICE-GB corpus had no significant gender differences in the functions of tag questions. The tags were used consistently in the order of informational, facilitating, challenging, and softening by both men and women regardless of age, education and private/public situations.

English Tag Questions (ETQs) are frequently used among native speakers in various situations. Though ETQs look simple and easy to learn, some ESL students with particular language backgrounds report that it is difficult to learn and utilize ETQs naturally. One of my hypotheses is that the familarity of ETQs depends on whether ELS students have similar syntactic structure in their native languages to English. To investigate this inquiry, I have compared syntactic structures of tag questions from five different languages: Polish, Deutsch, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, and Korean. In addition to the syntactic analysis, I have also surveyed Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ESL students, who comprise major population of ESL students, for their reflections on ETQs; whether they can differentiate the meaning of some basic syntaxes of ETQs. The results showed that there were significant differences in the responses of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students: Chinese students are much better in general than Japanese or Korean students. This paper contends that ETQ is one of the idiosyncratic features of English, and suggests that the syntactic and pragmatic differences of various languages should be considered in order to teach ETQs effectively.