The Interplay of the Prosody, Sequential roles, and Epistemic Positions: Kuleh-kwuna ‘I see’ in Korean Conversation
Kyoungmi Ha
UCLA
Scholars in conversation analysis (CA) have been interested in the relationships between response tokens and their roles in sequential organization and epistemic position (Beach, 1993; Heritage, 1984; Schegloff, 1982; Schegloff, 1992; Schegloff, 2007). For example, “mm hm”, “uh huh”, and “yes” invite continuation (Schegloff, 1982). “Okay” closes the prior sequence and opens another sequence and/or shifts topics (Beach, 1993). The purpose of this study is to investigate the sequential roles, epistemic positions, and prosodic features of the Korean response token kuleh-kwuna ‘I see’, which consists of the deictic predicate kulehta ‘that is so’ and the sentence-ending (SE) suffix –kwuna. In previous studies, only the SE suffix –kwuna in kuleh-kwuna has been analyzed. The SE suffix –kwuna occurs in the context of unexpected discovery, surprise, or realization (Sohn 1999; Strauss, 2005). In this study, I elucidate the use of kuleh-kwuna ‘I see’ as a response token. I utilize naturally occurring conversation data based on the CA, and corpus methodology. I use the Korean intonation convention, the ToBI convention (Jun, 2000) and the softwear Praat to analyze the prosodic aspects of kuleh-kwuna. The data consist of 100 naturally occurring audio recordings of ordinary telephone conversations and face-to-face conversations taken from the Korean TV program “We got married”. I collected a total of 44 tokens of kuleh-kwuna from the data. This study finds that the combined form, kuleh–kwuna is generally used when Korean speakers acknowledge new information from interlocutors. Regarding the sequential and epistemic roles, the epistemic equilibrium that the response token expresses naturally becomes a vehicle for sequence closing in conversations. The corpus shows that 35 of the 44 tokens of kuleh-kwuna were used for closing either a sequence of question and answer and/or a topic (81.3%). Different prosodic features are observed when the response token is used as sequence closer of Q & A or a topic closer. Of the nine boundary tones in Korean, low-high, low-high-low, and flat intonations are frequently used with the kuleh-kwuna (sequence closer of Q & A) indicating that a speaker has acquired new information and is not inviting topic closure. When kuleh-kwuna is used as a topic closer, falling intonation is used. Furthermore, it is uttered with lower intensity than surrounding utterances. This study elucidates the use of kuleh-kwuna as a response token, the significance of its sequential positions, and prosodic features that differentiate the sequential roles.
References
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