Meaning Negotiation and Negative Interrogatives in Korean Task-Based Conversation

Abstract

It is well-known that interrogatives do more than `questioning`; it is a form of social action (Heritage 2002). This study aims to explore the forms negative interrogatives and social actions they perform in Korean task-oriented conversations. The data this study is based on is a cross-linguistic problem-solving video corpus, where two people worked together to construct a coherent story by arranging fifteen picture cards. The subjects were all female speakers, with half of them being university students and the other half teachers. I examine the Korean data consisting of 20 pairs, and refer to the corresponding English data whenever possible. This study started with an interesting observation in the data that the Korean speakers used almost twice as many interrogatives as the American counterparts (45 vs. 23 per interaction). Furthermore, while negative interrogatives rarely occurred in the English data, they were everywhere in the Korean data (9 vs. 140 in the whole data). It seems that exchanges such as example (1) on the next page, a question and an answer in the form of a question, are a norm in the Korean data, not an exception. This striking difference suggests that negative interrogatives should make an important contribution in the process of the Korean interaction. It seems that negative interrogatives are basic tools to negotiate meaning by soliciting confirmation/agreement from the addressee, just like tag questions in English. This might explain why tag questions in the Korean data are relatively infrequent compared to the English counterparts (56 vs. 91). The complementary distribution suggests that the functions English tag questions have are shared between tag and negative questions in Korean. There are three major types of negative interrogatives in the data: ke(s) ani- (Type 1), -ci anh- (Type 2), and -cianh- (Type 3), a short form of Type 2, as shown in (2)-(4). It is found that ke(s) ani- type occur most frequently, followed by -cianh- type and -ci anh- type. I claim that the choice of the three types of negative interrogatives in Korean is largely dependent on the speaker`s estimation of the following two factors: (a) the degree of certainty about the information conveyed, and (b) the degree of common ground with the addressee. The more confident the speaker is about the information and about the agreement from the addressee, the more likely she will use Type 3 over Type 2. Type 1 is the most mitigating device whereby the speaker displays her uncertainty about her own belief and the hearer`s agreement. In sum, it seems that Korean speakers employ indirect, less assertive means such as negative interrogatives to negotiate meaning and achieve mutual consent.