Content area
This dissertation examines the sequential structures and the practice of actions that are organized through an adjacency pair of a negative yes/no question and a response produced to the question in naturally occurring conversations of Korean and English. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the dissertation explicates what conversational speakers do by deploying a particular form of negative yes/no question and designing a response to the question in a certain manner.
The dissertation examines the two types of negative yes/no questions in Korean conversation, the pre-verbal negation (an) yes/no question and the post-verbal negation (-ci anh-) yes/no question, and negative declarative yes/no questions in English conversation for their sequential structure and action formation. The study explicates how speakers select and deploy different negative yes/no questions to accomplish different social actions and how they design responses to the question and reveal how they understand the specific action(s) implemented through the question.
The dissertation demonstrates that both Korean speakers and English speakers treat a negative yes/no question-answer sequence as a context-sensitive practice that is locally determined by the combination of multiple factors: (i) what is addressed through the question turn, (ii) how the question turn claims the epistemic status between the questioner and the recipient, and (iii) how the question relates to the information or position conveyed in the prior turn (turn-position), as well as (iv) which grammatical form formats the question (turn-composition). Furthermore, the different actions embodied by each of the pre-verbal negation yes/no question-answer sequences and the post-verbal negation yes/no question-sequences also suggest that Korean speakers deploy the two negation constructions as separate interactional objects that have different consequences for the course of action in the interaction.
The dissertation also compares the ways in which responses to the negative yes/no question-answer sequences are organized in Korean and English, particularly concerning the issue of type-conformity. The findings suggest that speakers' attentiveness to the sequentiality of and the action implemented through turns-at-talk is one underlying force that sustains language-mediated social interaction across languages. Overall, these findings provide an empirically grounded understanding of the intersection between grammar and social interaction.