Stancetaking and Grammar:
The Case of the Korean Sentence-ending Suffixes –Nya and –Ni
Seunggon Jeong
Cornell University
Eun Young Bae
UCLA
Abstract
According to Du Bois (2007), stancetaking is one of the most important things we do with language. In line with Du Bois, the present study acknowledges stancetaking as a fundamental property of human language use and seeks to illuminate the role of grammar in stancetaking by exploring the stance work done by two Korean sentence-ending suffixes –nya and –ni.
Traditionally, –nya and –ni have been understood as prototypes of sentence-type markers, which can be used interchangeably, as both –nya and –ni are employed to form an interrogative sentence that seeks information unknown to the speaker from the hearer (e.g., I.-S. Lee, 2005). This study, however, demonstrates that –nya and –ni can function as stance markers that show the relationship between the speaker’s stance and that of the prior speaker, i.e., the speaker’s alignment with the stance displayed by the prior speaker.
To investigate the stance-related functions of –nya and –ni, this study focuses on instances of –nya and –ni that are used to form rhetorical questions in that their stance work may become prominent in these cases where –nya and –ni do not carry out the function of questioning. In total, such 149 cases of –nya and 39 cases of –ni were found in 50 telephone conversations between native speakers of Korean obtained from the Linguistic Data Consortium spoken corpus (totaling 800 minutes). Each instance of –nya and –ni were then analyzed within the theoretical and analytical framework of stance proposed by Du Bois (2007).
The findings of this study show that –nya and –ni are in fact starkly different in terms of their stance-taking functions, thereby revealing that they are not interchangeable. –Nya tended to be employed to indicate the speaker’s diverging stance with the prior speaker’s stance whereas –ni tended to be used to indicate the speaker’s converging stance with the prior speaker’s stance.
The grammaticalization of stance alignment into the sentence-ending suffixes
–nya and –ni in Korean thus clearly demonstrates that grammar is not only a resource to indicate the syntactic information of an utterance but also a socio-interactional and public resource that encodes the relationship between the speaker’s stance and that of the prior speaker and thereby enables dialogic construction of stance in and through interaction.
References
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in
Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction (pp. 139-182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lee, I. -S. (2005). Hankwuke mwunpep [Korean Grammar]. Seoul: Seoul National University Press.