| From a conversation analytic perspective, this dissertation investigates how talk-in-turns in conversation are constructed and organized in a way that minimizes gaps and overlaps between speakers. Based on an informed assumption that turns are built out of turn units that allow the projection of their possible end points, I first characterize Korean turn units by focusing on where and how a transition-relevance place is constituted. Provided that the emergent action is recognizable, transition-relevance places are frequently achieved prior to the arrival of a projected end point, with an occasional augmentation of prosodic completion. The flexibly-treated notion of grammatical completion may result in equivocal or premature completions, and such an intrinsic weakness in the system is compensated for by a wide range of interactional practices.;Second, I explore how turns become 'permeable' (Lerner, 1996) at a wide range of syntactic points in a way that allows speakership change at a non-transition-relevance place. By examining how turns can be segmented from the rest of the turn yet to appear with little positional constraint, I argue that permeability can be rendered as a strategic practice for dealing with various interactional issues in multiple dimensions. Turn segmentation is also compared with other conversational practices that similarly retards turn progression, which suggests that the progression of a turn can be manipulated in a way that controls the timing of speakership change. Third, I show how pro-predicates such as kuleta ('be so') and kulehta ('do so') can be used as a lexical resource for ensuring the closure or re-closure of a turn on various levels. It is speculated that they serve as a system resource for compensating for a potential problem in the Korean turn-taking system, in which turn endings are easily compromised in the service of various social actions. Lastly, I explore how the high degree of manipulation of turn progressivity in Korean possibly affects Korean English learners' turn constructional practices and turn-taking in English conversation. Focusing on the recurrent phenomenon in Korean learners' English, i.e., the segmentation of turns at implausible syntactic positions, I show how Korean learners of English resort to Korean turn constructional strategies in dealing with interactional issues in English.;This dissertation demonstrates how Korean conversationalists address one of the fundamental generic organizational problems, i.e., turn-taking, as well as providing a proposal for how the findings can be used to understand interlanguage behaviors of Korean learners of English. |
