Interactional uses of self-talk in Korean
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2023
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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This study explores the interactional uses of self-talk in Korean. “Self-talk” generally refers to speech directed to oneself. In a conventional sense, self-talk in public may be seen as violating social norms; however, in many interactional contexts, self-talk is not only acceptable, but contributes to mutual understanding between participants in the social encounter. Any competent member of a language community understands the underlying rules of how self-talk works, but little has been written about self-talk from interactional perspectives. In the Korean language, self-talk cannot be understood without considering linguistic features of self-talk utterances. While previous studies have identified and analyzed discourse functions of sentence enders that occur in Korean self-talk, the interactional uses of self-talk in Korean are underexplored. In order to gain a clearer picture of where, when, and how self-talk is used, this study investigates occurrences of self-talk in both private and interactional settings in data collected from reality TV shows, using conversation analytic and interactional linguistic methods. In this dataset, twenty-one different sentence enders used in self-talk (e.g., -ney, -(n)untey, -ta, -(u)nka/-na, -ci, -e/ayakeyssta, -kwuna, -e/ayaci) are observed. The analysis identifies several distinct actions carried out through self-talk, including dealing with new information, displaying stances or attitudes, talking through troubles, co-constructing future actions, managing knowledge or information, and constructing reported thought. The interactional uses of self-talk are explicated from two main theoretical perspectives, centering on participation frameworks and politeness. First, the use of self-talk can loosen up a participation framework: Self-talk places less imposition on hearers to take or respond to a turn, and less burden on speakers to choose or retain addressees while managing the complicated task of carrying on a multiparty conversation. Second, the use of self-talk helps Korean speakers negotiate politeness, which, in Korean, is intertwined with honorification and speech levels. The study considers how speakers manage the particular audienceship of self-talk within processes of politeness negotiation, and what drives the manipulation of speech styles and honorifics. Much remains to be explored regarding the social life of self-talk. This study highlights the pervasiveness of self-talk in our language life and calls for further exploration and discussion of self-talk from a variety of approaches.
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Korean language--Spoken Korean, Self-talk
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