Conversation Analysis

This chapter overviews conversation analytic studies conducted on Korean language. Conversation analysis is now a well-established approach that considers naturally occurring talk as “the primordial site of sociality” and “aims to describe, analyze and understand talk as a basic and constitutive feature of human social life”. The interest in CA in Korean academia was registered by some Korean linguists presumably as early as the late 1970s, soon after the seminal paper on turn-taking by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson appeared in Language in 1974. The agenda of many of early studies was apparently shaped by the analytic concerns of Korean linguists and grammarians, which include studies of connectives and modal markers. This chapter attempts to provide an accessible introduction to CA and a sketch of the topics Korean conversation analysts (CAsts) have addressed in the last two decades by covering the wide-ranging topics researched from the early 1990s to the present.