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- What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?
Many early studies in conversation analysis on turn-taking (e.g., Goodwin, 1979, 1980; Jefferson, 1984) have inspired me and shaped my thinking as an LSI researcher, but the study that had the strongest impact on me and still continues to be inspirational is A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). I encountered the work as one of the reading assignments during the first weeks of my first quarter in the Applied Linguistics program at UCLA. I had previously studied theoretical linguistics as an undergraduate in Korea, and still vividly remember being utterly struck by the study’s object (i.e., turn-taking in conversation) and the neat organization of the object (that there are actually analyzable patterns in seemingly “messy” conversation!). That human interaction can be described in such an orderly way was simply an eye-opener and led me to further pursue the study of language use.
The key notions in CA, such as “turn”, “turn constructional unit” and “adjacency pairs”, introduced in SSJ (1974) and other related works prominently figured into the analyses of English and Korean everyday conversation I undertook as a graduate student at UCLA. I have been engaged in detailed analyses of both beginnings and endings of turns-at-talk, based on a collection of audio- and video-taped everyday interactions. My interests in fittedness between turns and turn projection led me to my dissertation, which was an English and Korean cross-linguistic study of turn-beginning tokens in diverse sequential environments.
- What question you are currently trying to explore? How?
My primary research questions are: Which linguistic resources (e.g., syntax, lexis, prosody) do speakers use to construct social actions in interaction, and how do they influence ways in which social actions are organized in different languages? As I have been grappling with these questions, I have become particularly interested in comparing interactional practices found in different languages and describing language-specific and/or universal practices in social interaction.
My doctoral dissertation, which I completed in May 2011, was a collection of studies of turn-beginning design of second position (i.e., response) and third position turns in English and Korean. Although English and Korean have different syntactic constraints since they are typologically different languages, through my analysis I found that interactions in these languages exhibit a similar way of organizing a social action. Among many commonalities that speakers of diverse languages share is the turn initial position. Since interaction is produced in real time, there is always a place where one person’s turn ends and another person’s turn begins, placing a focus on turn initial position. One question I was interested in was what happens at the beginning of a response turn, for example, when the response speaker departs from answering the prior question. The response speaker, regardless of the language used for the interaction, commonly marks this departure at the very beginning of his/her response turn. However, the particular ways it is marked is constrained and/or determined by the medium of locally available resources in the language. This finding has been particularly remarkable for Korean since Korean is commonly described as a “right-headed” language and previous research has focused primarily on the interactional work accomplished towards the end of a turn, mainly by sentence-final particles. My study has shown that turn-beginnings in Korean also serve as an effective place for the management of an interaction. To further pursue my research interest in the uses of turn-beginnings, I am presently working with other researchers to bring together studies of turn-beginnings as an interactional resource across different languages.
Additionally, I am currently investigating (with my colleague Innhwa Park at UCLA) question and response sequences between test takers and questioners in the context of an English oral proficiency exam that measures international students’ language ability as related to their teaching assistant duties. With this study, we are hoping to draw practical implications for test administrators, curriculum developers and test takers.