Kim, Kyu-hyun. 2017. “Topic Marker -Nun as an Exploratory Device: Shifting Domains for Stance Management in Pursuit of Intersubjectivity“. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(2), 29~72. From the conversation-analytic perspective, this paper investigates the interactional import of -nun used in assessment activities. The analysis of naturally-occurring interactions suggests that the domain-shifting function of -nun is closely attuned to shifting, or even reversing, the valence of the speaker's evaluative stance in a way that invokes a hitherto unmentioned domain as grounds for soliciting the interlocutor's agreement/affiliation, expressing partial agreement, or marking oblique disagreement. Often formulated as an overstatement to be retracted and/or as a move to solicit the interlocutor's collaborative uptake through claiming knowledge (or lack thereof), the nun-utterance furnishes the speaker with a resource for obliquely implementing face-threatening actions, pursuing common ground, or upgrading affect. Embodying the speaker's ‘exploratory’ stance, the use of -nun conveys the sense that the speaker is going beyond the ‘appearance’ of the matter at hand (e.g., a sub-domain from which a new generic feature may be drawn and attributed to the referent). This practice, which is further supported by the nun-marked adverbials formulated as a ‘logical guidepost expression’, provides for the basis on which the speaker organizes assessment activities in an other-attentive way, e.g., through upgrading affiliation and downgrading disaffiliation vis-à-vis the interlocutor's prior action, while sustaining his/her baseline stance and epistemic independency.

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 study explores the morpho-syntactic properties of the ‘overgenerated be’ that appears between a subject and a thematic verb (e.g., she is go home) produced by Korean-speaking English learners, and discusses how the overgenerated be reflects L2 inflection development. I argue that the overgenerated be initially functions as a topic marker, but then develops into a verbal inflection. A total of 377 writings of 23 first-year Korean middle school students were examined for the study. The students were divided into three groups based on their English proficiency. The overgenerated be was found mostly in the two lowest proficiency groups: the lowest proficiency group used the overgenerated be as a topic marker, while the medium proficiency group used the ‘overgenerated be’ as a verbal inflection to mark tense.