Negatively-Formatted Requests for Confirmation in Korean Conversation: Three Types of Verbal Negation as Interactional Resources

From a conversation-analytic perspectiv e, this article analyzes three types of verbal negation in Korea n, which shape requests for confirmation (R fCs) into distinctive interactional resource s. The pre-verbal negation ( an ) RfC emerges in the context where the recipient is prompted to see the “fittednes s” of its confirmable as referencing an “allusive” aspect of hi s/h er situated domai n, inferentially formulated by the questioner as a “negative even t. ” The pos t-verbal negation ( ci anh ) renders the RfC a vehicle for making mitigated assertion s, seeking the recipient’s agreement in acquiescence to the questioner’s “problematizing” stanc e. The use of post-nominalization negation ( nun-ke ani ) RfC exhibits the questioner’s “conjecturing” stanc e, displaying norm-based deon - tic orientations treating the noted event at hand as deviant or counter-expectational. The target of the confirmable is formulated an “entity” assessable by the recipient as an externally-positioned c o-member/e valuato r. Cross-linguistic implications of the findings are discussed, in relation to English tag questions and negative interrogative s.


Introduction1
Negative questions are frequently used in constructing requests for confirmation (RfCs henceforth) in Korean conversation, which are formatted with different types of turn-design whose features embody a range of methodic ways of organizing a distinctive set of requesting actions.In this article, I analyze three types of verbal negation as notable turn-design features of negatively-formulated Korean RfCs: pre-verbal negation (an 'not' + V),2 postverbal negation (V + -ci anh 'not'), and post-nominalization negation (V + -nun-ke 'attributive/adnominal-thing' + ani 'not:copula').
The RfC is defined as a form of question that makes relevant a confirming or disconfirming response by another participant.They establish a more or less flat, recipient-tilted epistemic gradient, with the questioner claiming a "partially knowing" position towards the recipient, who has epistemic supremacy (König and Pfeiffer, i.prep.).While this study focuses on RfCs formatted with the three "forms" of negative marking, the search for RfCs was conducted primarily with a focus on function rather than form (de Ruiter 2012).It excludes RfC-like negative questions that do not make the occurrence of either confirmation or disconfirmation sequentially relevant.Examples of the three types of negativelyformatted RfCs that are of the focus of this paper are introduced below: The pre-verbal negation (often called the "short form") RfC involves the negative adverb an ('not') placed before the verb.The post-verbal negation (often called the "long form") RfC involves the particle ci ('committal'), which is followed by the auxiliary negative verb anh3 (Choi, 1995;Lee, 1999;Sohn, 1999).
The RfC with post-nominalization negation involves the nominalization as its component, comprised of the attributive/adnominal particle (n)un and the "defective" general noun ke(s).
Though seemingly overlapping in function, their alternative question designs shape differently the way the requesting action and response to it are sequentially organized.In an attempt to elucidate their mutually distinctive interactional functions, I draw upon the perspectives of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (Sacks et al., 1974;Sacks, 1992;Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2018).Attention is given to detailing the interactional environments where the use of RfCs is occasioned and responded to, which is shaped by the epistemic relationships and the nature of the confirmable.It is argued that differences between the three forms of negative-formatted RfCs can be accounted for in terms of the questioner's displayed orientation towards (i) other-attentively managing the recipient's domain (pre-verbal negation) (Section 3.1); (ii) problematizing the recipient's or shared domain (post-verbal negation) (Section 3.2); and (iii) resolving an observed discrepancy through invoking normative assumption (post-nominalization negation) (Section 3.3).Cross-linguistic implications of the findings are discussed with reference to similarities and differences observed between post-verbal negation RfCs and English reversed-polarity tag questions (and negative interrogatives) (Sections 3.2 and 4).
For data, a total of 200 tokens of RfCs were identified in audio-and video-recorded Korean conversation4; 52 instances are from video-recorded and 148 from audio-recorded face-to-face conversation (K.Kim, submitted).Out of these 200 instances of RfCs, 61 are negatively-formatted RfCs, including 43 RfCs with verbal negation, formatted with pre-verbal, post-verbal, and again that-time that-thing give-ATTR-thing NEG:COP-INTERRO "Would it be the case (as an expected course of events) that he again is going to give us that thing which he gave at that time?(I hope not.)"The present analysis is based on the examination of 13 pre-verbal negation RfCs, 21 post-verbal negation RfCs, and 9 post-nominalization negation RfCs.

Background: Negative Questions in Korean
RfCs, negatively or positively formatted, may take the form of questions with declarative or interrogative sentence-ending suffixes.5In Korean conversation, the negative question is one of the most frequently used grammatical resources for formatting RfCs, with this tendency becoming particularly salient when viewed from a cross-linguistic perspective (Pfeiffer et al., i.prep.).6 Most of the previous research on Korean, often primarily conducted from a syntactic or semantic perspective (Sohn, 1978;Koo, 1990;J. Kim, 2000), has as its focus given to disambiguating different interpretations arising from the "long form" negative question (i.e., post-verbal negation question), as opposed to the "short form" negative question (i.e., pre-verbal negation question).More recent studies on negative questions, conducted from a functional/interactional perspective, analyze the role of negative polarity in naturally occurring discourse.Noh (2009), for instance, analyzes the pre-verbal (short form) an, post-verbal Contrastive PragmaticS (2023) 1-50 | 10.1163/26660393-bja10079 (long form) ci anh, and a nominalized form ke ani, using the sign-based form-content analysis of the Columbia School.Posing 'COMMITMENT' as the basic meaning shared by the three forms of negative question, Noh claims that their skewed functional distributions in discourse contexts derive from the semantic system composed of WEAK COMMITMENT (pre-verbal an), STRONGER COMMITMENT (post-nominalization ke ani) and STRONGEST COMMITMENT (post-verbal ci anh).It is argued that these components indicate, respectively, the speaker's weak belief, generally accepted belief, and the speaker's own judgment.M.-H.Kim (2010), using elicited narratives as data, analyzes differences between ani (NEG:copula) and ci anh ('committal' ci + anha 'not to do'), in comparison with the corresponding English constructions.Her findings suggest that negative questions are used more frequently in Korean than in English, and that ci anh, which is used to convey stronger assertion by the speaker than ani, is geared more to involving the addressee in the negotiatory relationship of interdependence.A. Kim (2016) analyzes the post-verbal negative question from a cognitively-oriented, usage-based grammar and grammaticalization perspective.She suggests that different (and often ambiguous) interpretations arising from the use of long form negative questions can be plotted along a gradient of speech act based on a range of parameters, including the speaker's certainty, polarity, and type of expected response.
In the field of conversation analysis, J. Park (2009) analyzes pre-verbal negation questions in ordinary conversations, showing that the use of the pre-verbal negation question is embedded in contexts where the questioner infers a "negative event" from the recipient's prior telling.Y. Park (2010) examines negative questions marked with pre-verbal an-, post-verbal -ci anh, and post-nominalization nun-ke-n ep ('ATTR-thing-TOP not:exist') in the context of doctor-patient interactions.She describes how the three forms of negative question furnish the doctor with alternative options for formulating their history-taking questions, with the doctor's claim of epistemic rights modulated in varying degrees.M. Kim (2015b) analyzes the nominalized negation construction -nun ke ani ('it is not the case/fact') used in questions and statements, examining its use as a stance marker invoking incongruity between reality and expectation as a basis for organizing disaffiliative or ironic/humorous actions.Kang (2022), using data from a Korean congressional hearing, analyzes the "formal style" post-verbal negation interrogative (formatted with ci anh supnikka), along with the pseudo-tag expression -cyo ('committal-COP:POL').She claims that post-verbal negation interrogative questions, primarily used as a fact-checking device, are hearable as assertions rather than genuine requests for information, embodying the questioner's biased stance towards the matter at hand, though the questioner's epistemic claim is not strongly assertive by virtue of their correlation with rhetorical questions.These studies offer useful insights into the ways in which Korean "negative questions," identified as constructions formally defined (e.g., short form vs. long form), are constructed and used distinctively.While drawing upon their findings, this article, with finer analytic granularity, focuses on elucidating how the three formal features of negative question -pre-verbal, post-verbal, and post-nominalization -are constitutive of the action implemented by "RfCs," which were identified primarily in terms of "function," i.e., whether they make confirmation or disconfirmation a relevant next action.It aims to compare the three different forms of negative polarity markings as compositional features that shape RfCs into constructions that have mutually distinctive interactional imports, which are analyzed in terms of epistemics, sequence organization and action formation (Heritage, 2012;Levinson, 2013;Deppermann and Haugh, 2022).Cross-linguistic implications are discussed, with reference to the role and positioning of negative polarity markers in the management of epistemic claims made through RfCs.

Pre-verbal Negation RfC: Formulating a Negative Event in the Recipient's Domain
The pre-verbal negation RfC is commonly deployed in an interactional environment where the speaker makes a "negative observation" (Schegloff, 1988).Motivated as a formulation of an absent event/item located in the recipient's domain, which is inferentially accessible to the questioner (J.Park, 2009), it functions as a prompt for immediate responsive action, indexing the questioner's other-attentive orientation towards obtaining straightforward confirmation.
Consider Extract (1).This conversation is between friends at an outdoor university cafeteria in the United States.Kyeng is eating a breakfast combo plate, which she is sharing with her husband.In the preceding context, Hani asked Kyeng which items are included in the combo plate.In response, Kyeng lists the food items included in the plate, and at line 21, the list concludes with the mention of "orange juice."Noticing that coffee is not included, Hani, at line 23, makes an RfC formatted with pre-verbal negation (khephi-nun an tuleka-kwu-yo?"And coffee is not included?"):With her RfC, Hani formulates the absence of "coffee" as an inferable upshot feature of Kyeng's preceding list.It is produced as its candidate incremental extension (Bolden, 2010), with its incremental status being articulated by the use of the turn-final ko/kwu ('and') (M.Kim, 2015a) ("And coffee is not included?").7 This turn-compositional feature renders the RfC parasitic upon the prior turn (Heritage and Sorjonen, 1994), indexing the questioner's orientation towards eliciting straightforward confirmation, non-problematically.Hani's RfC is responded to with Kyeng's confirmation, produced in the form of a repeat (line 25).8This sequence, followed by a post-expansion in which the price of the combo plate is confirmed (lines 26-27), leads to Hani's positive assessment (lines 28-29) (".h Wow, then it's very good for two people to share!").Consider further Extract (2).In the preceding context, Yun, a visiting professor who has just arrived in the U.S. to spend his sabbatical year, said that he had purchased a telephone service plan.At lines 1-2, Jinhi, wife of the pastor in the local community, uses a positively-formatted RfC to ask Yun if he had to pay a deposit ("they ask you to pay a deposit, don't they?").9Marked by the "committal" particle ci functioning as a pseudo-tag,10 it indexes Jinhi's stance pursuing Yun's agreement on presuppositionally shared grounds.Yun responds by saying that he settled for the cheapest plan (lines 4-5).It is to this that Jinhi, at line 8, makes another RfC, formatted with pre-verbal negation (tiphasit an hay-yo?"(So) you don't pay a deposit?"):

7
Hani's RfC as an incremental extension is further articulated by the use of the "topic" particle nun (khephi-nun an tuleka-kwu-yo?"And coffee-nun is not included?"),which constructs the referent it marks as one that is potentially relevant but marginal/peripheral, not having been attended to in the preceding context (K.Kim, 2021).8 Kyeng's confirmatory response is produced as non-type-conforming response (Raymond, 2003) in which she repeats the expression that Hani used in her RfC.Responses to the pre-verbal negation RfC often take the form of a repeat, indexing the questioner's claim of epistemic independence (Enfield et al., 2019;K. Kim, i.prep.)(see discussion below).9 Note that Jinhi's inquiry is likely to be oriented to by Yun as initiating a pre-sequence (possibly pre-offer of a good telephone service plan), given that Jinhi, as the wife of the pastor, has been actively involved as a benefactor helping Yun and other visiting professors settle into the community.The "benefactor-beneficiary" category/identity work organized as such is oriented to by the participants throughout the whole sequence.10 Pseudo-tags are primary grammatical devices used for constructing RfCs in Korean (also see Extracts (3), (10), and ( 11)) (K.Kim, 2022).Agglutinated to the verb stem, they function like question tags, indexing the speaker's commitment to, or certainty of, the proposition in the confirmable (Choi, 1995;Lee, 1999).the cheapest plan (lines 4-5), from which it can be inferred that he probably would not have had to pay a deposit, as normally required by a "regular" service plan.This is confirmed through repetition by Yun at line 9, followed by a more detailed explanation of his monthly-payment plan (line 12).11In a similar vein, consider Extract (3).The participants are gathered at Yun's place as members of a Bible study group.In this conversation, the participants are reacting to Yun, who has expressed his concern about the handling of his moving boxes, which are being delivered to Korea from the U.S., where he had spent the previous year.At line 9, Min makes a pre-verbal negation RfC, marked by the pseudo-tag ci (yekise-n an kac-kwu-ka-si-ess-ci-yo? "From here you've not taken any, have you?"), immediately followed another RfC, which, positively formatted ("You bought it all there in the United States, right?"), overlaps with Yun's response at line 11: (3)  11 Overall, Jinhi's positively-formatted RfC at lines 1-2 is motivated as a pre-offer of information about a "good" service plan, e.g., requiring a minimum deposit money, which is optimized for confirmation that would serve as a go-ahead signal.Note, in this respect, that her next RfC at line 8, formatted with pre-verbal negation, indexes cross-cutting preferences (Schegloff, 2007).For design-based preference, it is optimized confirmation ("No, I don't pay a deposit."),but for action-based preference, it is tilted towards soliciting disconfirmation ("(Actually) I pay a deposit."), on the basis of which she would be able to proceed to introduce and offer a "better" service plan that would require a minimum or no deposit.(Pomerantz, 1986) and followed by elaboration (hana-twu--hana-twu an kaci-e-kass-kwu kekise sa-kacikwu incey--"I haven't taken any, any (from here) and, there I purchased for stuff and then-…").Extracts (2) and (3) show that responses to RfCs are organized as a repeat, followed by elaboration.This pattern is also observed in Extract (4).At lines 1-10, Kyeng says that she removed beef and pork from their family diet since she suffered from a stomach flu caused from eating meat.At lines 8, 10 and 12, she says that, after excluding meat from the family diet, she finds that there are not that many dishes to cook.In response, Ari makes a pre-verbal negation RfC at line 13, inquiring whether her situation has led the whole family to avoid eating meat: 12 Note that the participants orient to Yun's prior telling as troubles-talk (Jefferson, 1988).
Min's RfC exhibits his concern towards a potential problem Yun might have.This is also observed in San's remark at lines 14-15, where he offers his own perspective by bringing attention to another problem, about the quality of the international package delivery service ("ehehe also, one cannot be sure whether the packages will be delivered with no problem"). (
The way Kyeng's response turn is organized exemplifies the general pattern of "repeat followed by elaboration," often observed as a feature of the sequence engendered by the pre-verbal negation RfC (see Extracts (2) and (3)).13In (4), this pattern can be taken as indexing "preference for agreement" as its organizational feature (Sacks, 1987), in that, though Kyeng initially responds with a repeat, adumbrating confirmation/affiliation, she ends up responding with disconfirmation.This suggests that Kyeng is closely orienting towards confirming the "agreeability" of the formulation offered by Ari's RfC as her "best guess," fitted to her own state of affairs (Pomerantz, 1988;Heritage and Raymond, 2021).
This last observation may offer a clue in accounting for the tendency of the pre-verbal negation RfC to be optimized for confirmation (no-like response), with the recipient's confirmatory response being predominantly constructed in the form of a repeat.In the sequence generated by the pre-verbal negation RfC, the task the recipient is prompted to implement can be described as confirming the "fittedness" of the content and action of the RfC to their own domain, which is firmly located in the recipient's situated domain, e.g., a breakfast combo plate that the recipient is eating with her partner in (1), the telephone service plan that the recipient has recently purchased in (2), the household items owned by the recipient in (3), and a diet program at the recipient's home in (4).
In these contexts, the questioner other-attentively displays concern towards the recipient by bringing up an absent event/item in the recipient's domain, vicariously from the recipient's perspective.Embedded in such a sequential context, the pre-verbal negation RfC emerges as a resource specifically geared to "formulating" (Heritage and Watson, 1979) an aspect or upshot of the recipient's prior talk or action as "allusive" (in the sense of something being "absent" or "not occurring").Formulating the upshot as such invites the recipient's confirmation in the next turn, prompting him/her to endorse the formulation as "fitted' or "appropriate" to his/her domain.The responsive action it engenders, as shown by the way it tends to take the form of a "repeat," manifests features of "confirming allusion" (Schegloff, 1996).14This response pattern, while embodying the recipient's epistemic independency, can be taken to index that the recipient is oriented towards confirming not only the content of the RfC, but also the "allusive" character of his/her prior talk (i.e., in terms of a "notably absent" event/item).
It is notable, in this respect, that a sequence where the use of pre-verbal negation RfCs is embedded is often characterized by repeated lexical expressions referencing a feature relevant to the recipient's allusive domain.As shown in the preceding abstracts, response to an RfC predominantly tends to contain a repeat of the verbal element: Tied to each other across turns, repeated verbal elements index that the recipient's allusive domain is the object of the participants' sustained attention.15Note that they are tied to other expressions used in the preceding context to reference the recipient's domain.For instance, in (1), "coffee" being "not included" is tied, in a contrastive relationship, back to other food items that are "included" in Kyeng's combo plate, e.g., "orange juice" (line 21).In (2), Jinhi's RfC at line 8 is "inferentially tied" to Yun's turn at lines 4-5 by way of being produced vicariously from the perspective of Yun, while being also tied to her earlier RfC at lines 1-2 through the verbal element being recycled from it (tiphasit ha "pay a deposit").In ( 3) and ( 4), the transitive verb phrases with a zero-marked object, kac "take (household stuff/baggage)" and mek "eat (meat)," are grammatically tied back to noun phrases that constitute their object, i.e., cim "household stuff" in Yun's turn at line 1 in (3) and koki "meat" in Kyeng's turns at lines 2 and 6 in (4).
Overall, RfCs with pre-verbal negation serve as a construction specialized for formulating a negative event "inferentially" observed in the recipient's domain (see Footnote 21).Their use embodies the questioner's retrospectively-displayed, other-attentive orientation (cf.Schegloff, 2007).Its remedial character, though not immediately graspable at the utterance level, is revealed through a close examination of its occasioned character with reference to the recipient's prior talk/action being retroactively constituted as "allusive," incomplete, or otherwise further explicatable on the recipient's terms.

3.2
Post-verbal Negation RfCs: Problematizing through Mitigated Assertion The post-verbal negation RfC serves as a resource embodying the questioner's biased commitment to some state of affairs, expressing a position or point of view to be affiliated with by the recipient (cf.Heritage, 2002).In contrast with pre-verbal negation, which is geared to prompting a straightforward confirmation on the recipient's terms, the post-verbal negation form ci anh, as a turn-design feature, serves to mitigate the assertion made on the questioner's terms post hoc, constructing the RfC as a discursive resource for pursuing the recipient's agreement.This interactional feature of the post-verbal negation RfC is underpinned by a two-step process organized in the post-verbal negation: solicitation of intersubjective commitment (with ci) and the mitigation of epistemic claim (with the auxiliary negative verb anh).The committal particle ci, indexing the speaker's commitment (Chang, 1984;Koo, 1992;Lee, 1999), presuppositionally invokes "alignment" (Clayman and Raymond, 2021) as a basis for seeking agreement (i.e., in the sense of "you know").The questioner's assertion is then mitigated with the negation component anh ('not').
Often, the use of the post-verbal negation RfC is embedded in sequential contexts where it is deployed as a resource for problematizing (or sometimes challenging) the recipient's prior talk or action with respect to his/her prior talk or action.(cf.Heritage, 2002Heritage, , 2003)).Its use is typically oriented to as implementing a reversed-polarity assertion (cf.Koshik, 2002), exhibiting the questioner's "problematizing stance."With the questioner's assertive claim being mitigated by the utterance-final negation component, post-verbal negation RfCs are canonically optimized for the confirmation in the form of agreement, with the recipient being pressed to acquiesce to the questioner's terms and to produce an active uptake to the topic being proffered.
Consider Extract (5).In this conversation, Ryu is saying that he once gave up ownership of a new apartment in the Gangnam District16 because of noise from speeding vehicles on the freeway nearby (lines 1-15).At lines 16-17, Yun makes a post-verbal negation RfC as he brings to Ryu's attention the fact that the apartment Ryu mentioned is "expensive" by virtue of being located in a popular residential area ("Uh but that place-that place is nice-, Don't people like -It's expensive, isn't it?").Ryu, at line 18, responds with confirmation, in the form of a repeat ("It is expensive."): (5) [Bible Study #1 (video-recorded), 12:14] (Ryu is talking about an apartment in Gangnam area that he had the opportunity to purchase in the past, an option he did not take due to noise from speeding vehicles on the freeway nearby.) 1 Ryu: With his RfC, Yun "problematizes" Ryu's past decision not to buy the apartment due to noise from the nearby freeway, given that it now commands a high premium, being located in the popular and expensive Gangnam area of Seoul.This RfC constitutes an implicit account-soliciting request (Bolden and Robinson, 2011).From line 21, Ryu explains that the target apartment was, during Korea's IMF crisis, more or less equal in price to another apartment in a district in the northern part of Seoul (Hayngdang-dong), which he ended up choosing.Ryu's telling is demonstrably imbued with "pathos" (lines 21-24), exhibiting his remorse for not having taken the apartment at issue, the current value of which is far higher than the one he chose.Note here that Yun, drawing upon the "factual knowledge" he presumably has as a Seoulite,17 engages Ryu, who is entitled to make a superior epistemic claim on the basis of his "first-hand" experience of having lived in the area at issue.Extract (6) offers another context where the post-verbal negation RfC emerges as a resource for problematizing an aspect of the recipient's domain on the basis of factual evidence drawn from the preceding context.This conversation was excerpted from a meeting between Korean language teaching assistants at an American university, where they are previewing a Korean language quiz made by Hani.At line 1, Jiho's post-verbal negation RfC is made topic initially, which indexes that he has a problem with one of the sentences in the test (o-pen com isangha-ci anh-ayo?"Question No. 5 a little strange, isn't it?"):The problematizing import of Jiho's RfC is registered by Hani, who responds with an extended turn explaining how she came up with that problematic sentence (cf.Seuren and Huiskes, 2017).Her response is defensive; she describes an "extenuating circumstance" that allegedly distracted her from crafting a proper test question,18 thereby conceding, off the record, the awkwardness of the question sentence she devised.
Contrastive PragmaticS (2023) 1-50 | 10.1163/26660393-bja10079 What is problematized by the RfC with post-verbal negation may not be located in the immediate context but is traceable to a matter that the speaker is treating as an issue to be addressed (or problematized) in regard to his/her personal agenda.Extract (7) is a case in point.This conversation was excerpted from a video-recorded interaction of a multiparty conversation involving eight participants, who are graduate students and their family members residing in the Santa Barbara area in California.In the preceding context, Sohi mentioned that she is planning to visit Korea.At lines 1-7, she makes an inquiry with an RfC with post-verbal negation as she brings up the question of whether the weight of luggage allowed in domestic and international flights is different:  Prefaced by the nominalized phrase kungkumhan-key ("What I'm wondering about is") projecting a cleft construction, Sohi's post-verbal negation RfC embodies her personal agenda to be addressed in her upcoming trip to Korea and back, in which she is expected to transit from an international flight (from Korea) to a connecting domestic flight when returning to Santa Barbara.It is directed to the recipients (her senior post-doctoral students and their family members) who can be assumed to have more traveling experience than her. and 22); they exhibit their deontic stance displayed towards alleviating Sohi's concern, by stating that transit passengers should be exempted from the discrepant standards on allowable luggage weight that are otherwise applied differently to domestic and international flights.This line of collaborative uptake becomes further intensified at lines 23-24, where Yun playfully introduces a hypothetical situation, describing what would come out if the rule is not bended ("What(h) are we supposed(h) to do? hh now () Are we supposed to discard some baggage before getting on board ()?, hhh").19This suggests that they orient to constructing their responsive uptake in acquiescence with the terms on which the confirmable posed by Sohi's RfC is grounded, to the effect that Sohi's displayed anxiety is alleviated.
The preceding observations suggest that the problematizing import of post-verbal negation RfCs is registered by the recipient who often goes about producing an extended account exhibiting his/her orientation to the questioner's agenda.The use of post-verbal negation RfCs, in this respect, can be said to make relevant a search for a "solution" to the "problem" the questioner has raised on his/her own terms (cf.Küttner and Ehmer, to appear).
In this process, the recipient's superior epistemic rights are put to the test, as the questioner confronts the recipient by claiming a "partially knowing" position, displaying his/her "knowledge of, and familiarity with, the situation" (Pomerantz, 1988).In the extracts examined above, claiming this position is warranted by the epistemic status of the questioner as a fellow resident in Seoul in (5), as a fellow Korean language teacher in (6), and as a fellow researcher studying abroad in (7).Placed in a "delicate" epistemic relationship as such, the questioner often exhibits a negotiatory and cautious stance through mitigating his/her epistemic claim, as suggested by the use of modal markers, adverbials, sentence-ending suffixes indexing doubt, or even disfluencies as modulating resources.20For instance, in (5), Yun's RfC is characterized by disfluencies, including several attempts at self-repair, embodying his orientation towards "doing being cautious" in problematizing the recipient's prior talk ("That place-that place is nice-Don't people like-It is expensive, isn't it?").

19
At line 26 and in the subsequent context (not shown in the data), Sohi clarifies her agenda in specific terms, informing the others that she had decided to take an airplane, instead of the airport bus (Airbus), which students normally use, when traveling from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, where she is to change to a connecting flight to Korea.20 The use of post-verbal negation RfCs is frequently accompanied by modulating elements, which are found in 71% (15 out of 21) of the data.This is a much higher rate than in the other two types of negation: modulating elements are found in only 2 out of 13 pre-verbal negation RfCs and 2 out of 9 post-nominalization negation RfCs (K.Kim, i.prep.).In (6), Jiho's RfC involves the adverbial expression com ('little'), with which the face-threatening import of his corrective action is mitigated ("Question No. 5 is a little strange, isn't it?").In ( 7), Sohi's RfC is produced as part of a cleft construction, interspersed with pauses, which indexes her cautiousness in formulating her request that has a direct bearing upon her personal agenda ("(And) What I've been wondering about is … when you come from Korea, (0.4) between the domestic flight and the international flight, (1.0) the weight of the baggage allowed on board is different, isn't it?").Note, in this respect, that the confirmable posed in the post-verbal negation RfC predominantly pertains to a "factual" matter that can be explicated and accounted for by the recipient.This is one of the features that makes the post-verbal negation distinct from the pre-verbal negation RfC, which can be explicated in terms of 'type of knowledge to be confirmed' , i.e., inferred vs. factual.That is, while the pre-verbal negation RfC tends to locate "inferred" knowledge as its basis (see Section 3.1), the confirmable posed in the post-verbal negation RfC tends predominantly to invoke "factual" knowledge,21 which furnishes the basis of topic proffer.In Extracts (5), ( 6), and ( 7), for instance, the confirmable targets knowledge that can be assessed on "factual" grounds: the apartment that has become "expensive" in (5), the test-sentence that looks "strange" in (6), and "different" rules about allowable baggage weights applied to domestic and international flights in (7).
This feature of post-verbal negation RfCs, geared to "fact-checking" in regard to the problematized aspect of the shared or the recipient's domain (M.-H.Kim, 2010;Kang, 2022), renders them a useful topic-proffering device.The recipient is prospectively oriented to accommodating the questioner's "problematizing" terms on which the recipient's agreement (yes-like response) is pursued.22On this count, they are distinct from pre-verbal negation RfCs, which, often

21
In the data examined in this paper, 20 out of 21 instances of the post-verbal negation RfC were categorized as 'factual' in terms of 'type of knowledge to be confirmed' , with only one instance categorized as 'inferred' .This contrasts with the pre-verbal negation RfC, which tends to address 'inferred' rather than 'factual' knowledge; the confirmable in 8 out of 13 instances of the pre-verbal negation RfC targets 'inferred' knowledge deriving from an immediate context, with only 4 being coded as 'factual' knowledge and 1 into the 'other' (i.e., not 'inferred' nor 'factual') category.

22
It is to be further noted that the use of the "topic" particle nun renders the post-verbal negation RfC optimized for (no-like response) confirmation.optimized for straightforward confirmation (no-like response), "retrospectively" prompt the recipient to address an aspect of his/her own domain on his/her own terms.Overall, the preceding analysis suggests that post-verbal negation RfCs are more or less equivalent to the English reversed-polarity tags, whose action tends to be understood as expressing a position or point of view, rather than questioning.These points merit a more detailed cross-linguistic study, particularly with reference to Heritage's claim that, in English, positive assertions with negative tags tend to be treated as "less assertive and conducive than its negative interrogative counterpart" (Heritage, 2002(Heritage, : 1440)).This difference in English arises in large measure from the TCU-initial vs. TCU-final placement of the negative interrogative component in negative interrogatives and positive assertions with negative tags (Heritage, 2002).In Korean, a parallel relationship seems to arise primarily from different interactional environments where post-verbal negation RfCs are deployed.For instance, in contexts where the questioner boldly problematizes the recipient's action, e.g., as not empirically grounded, self-contradictory, or not aligned with what the questioner's action, the use of post-verbal negation RfCs would constitute a more assertive "challenge" towards the recipient as a party personally accountable.Consider Extract (8), where Hani's RfC at lines 27-28 is sequentially accorded "challenging" import by way of disputing Kyeng's claim made in the immediately preceding context, where she reported finding the price of brand-name clothing as more expensive at the university's store than other stores off-campus (lines 14-22): system," as opposed to the "polarity agreement answering system" used in English (Levinson, 2012: 31).): [Excerpted from Y. Park (2010: 13)].The reverse in polarity in confirmation favored by the post-verbal negation question here is attributed to the "topic" particle nun, which functions to "marginalize" the referent it marks as "peripheral" (hence more "serious") symptom than the one(s) mentioned by the patient, the absence of which would denote an optimized condition for the patient (Heritage and Clayman, 2010) (See also Extract (1), where the nun-marked referent "coffee" is formulated as a "peripheral" category incumbent not included in the preceding list.)(K.Kim, 2021).
Contrastive PragmaticS ( 2023 In such a context, where the recipient's prior talk is directly contested as problematic, post-verbal negation of RfCs is deployed as a resource for "challenging" the other, manifesting features reminiscent of English negative interrogative questions (Heritage, 2002).However, we still get the sense that the turn-final positioning of the utterance-final negation component (ci anh) works to mitigate the questioner's epistemic claim post hoc.Given Bolinger's observation that English negative interrogatives and positive assertions with negative tags are equivalent in "conduciveness" -the conveyed proposition of the speaker to a particular kind of response (Bolinger, 1957: 99) -we find that, in Korean, such "equivalence in conduciveness" intoned with different degrees of assertiveness is primarily conveyed through the sequential management of the "problematizing" import of post-verbal negation RfCs, which may be escalated into a "challenging" import contingent upon the extent to which the recipient is made to be personally accountable to the domain being problematized.

Post-nominalization Negation: Managing Deviancy on Normative Assumption
The RfC with post-nominalization negation involves the nominalizer nun-ke ('attributive/adnominal-thing').Nun-ke serves as a "distancing" resource (cf.Suh and Kim, 1991),24 constructing the RfC as one with an "identificational" structure, as indexed by the copula verb i in the negation component ani ('NEG:COP') (Jung, 2015).This compositional feature contributes to formulating the target of the confirmable as an "identifiable entity" that can be evaluated against normative standards, e.g., a shared established fact or normative course of events (M.Kim, 2015b).It renders the RfC an "impersonalization" device deployable in a way that is more or less "context-free," not anchored in any immediate contexts (see Extracts (9) and (12) below).25 produced (wonlay 'originally').Kyeng does not respond to Hani's RfC, as indicated by the micro-pause at line 29, a feature of dispreferred-response that projects her disaffiliative response.This sequence is not further developed, and the situation is saved, as Hani resumes her assessment of the T-shirt at line 30 by recycling the expression she used earlier at line 13 (ippu-tulakwu-yo "(I've found) it is very pretty.").

24
More generally, the nominalizer nun-ke as a "distancing" resource is also found in modal expressions such as -(n)un-ke(s)-kat ('it seems') and -(u)l-ke(s) ('gonna'), marked with the irrealis mood attributive ul.The distancing practice their use implements furnishes a methodic basis on which the speaker mitigates his/her epistemic claim in making an assessment or adumbrates the fulfillment of a future action pro forma (cf.Suh and Kim, 1991).
This feature is particularly salient in the case of an RfC formatted with positive polarity marking, as shown in the following extract: Unlike in the case of the post-verbal negation RfC, the use of postnominalization negation RfCs embodies not so much the questioner's assertive stance, as it does a concern, doubt, or counter-expectation towards an observed event/item being treated as "normatively deviant."Consider Extract (9), which is excerpted from a multi-party conversation between friends.At line 1, Won topic-initially makes an RfC formatted with postnominalization negation as he displays his concern to Jiho about the likelihood that their mutual friend, who only served them tacos with sauce only (i.e., with no meat or vegetables) for dinner on their previous visit, may offer the same on their forthcoming second visit ("ts..hoh my, (eh just) (0.6) Would it be the case (as an expected course of events) that he again is going to give us that thing which he gave at that time?(I hope not.)"):26(The TA meeting is over, and the participants are getting themselves ready to leave.) 1 Kyeng:→ 김하니씨는 이제 get out of quiz 하는 거예요? 응. [응: ung. [ung: "Yes.Yes." [으:: 어 .hh바쁘실 때 3 Kyeng: [u:: eh .hhpappu-si-lttay RC DM busy-HONOR-when "u:: eh .hhwhen everybody is busy." The confirmable that Kyeng formulates with her nun-ke RfC at line 1 is not anchored in any immediate contexts, nor is it located in the wider span of interactions in which the conversation is embedded.This points to the feature of nun-ke that renders the RfC a resource that the speaker can use without the need to "anchor" his/her requesting action in the immediate context, mostly relying on the invoked domain in the discourse history shared by the interlocutor for its relevance (Jung, 2015).This is supported by distributional tendencies observed in the data.In the category of '(presence of) anchor' , out of the total of 11 (out of 200) instances of 'no anchor' identified in the data, more than half (6 instances) involve the nun-ke with positive polarity marking.The "equivocal" status of the confirmable in RfCs with the nominalization nun-ke is also suggested by the fact that it is often not clearly categorizable in terms of 'type of knowledge to be confirmed' .Overall, there are a total of 11 (out of 200) instances of RfCs categorized into the category 'other' type of knowledge (i.e., not 'inferred' nor 'factual').As many as 7 out of those 11 instances involve the nominalizer nun-ke with positive polarity marking.

26
Won's concern, as indexed in his displayed stance, is subtly foreshown by his use of the adverb tto ('again'), preceded by tongue-clicking (ts.), a response cry (ayu 'oh my') and discourse markers (eh kunyang 'eh just').Won's concern, embodied in his RfC, is grounded in the normative reasoning about what the host is to serve his guests for dinner, in terms of the type of food to be normatively offered.The recipient, Jiho, who shares the same experience, is mobilized as a co-party to endorse his griping (or mock-griping) against their mutual friend in regard to what he perceived as inadequate service he offered as the host.Note that Jiho affiliates with the import of Won's RfC only minimally (line 6), with a brief "loaded" response, interspersed with laugh tokens; while he acknowledges the success of Won's repair ("Oh::: hh (you mean) that(h) thing, h"), he comes forward neither with confirmation nor disconfirmation.27Post-nominalization negation RfCs often emerge as a resource with which the questioner invokes discrepancies between the observed event and his/her reasoning based on an established fact/normative course of event or between reality and assumption (M.Kim, 2015b).Consider Extract (10).This conversation was excerpted from a multi-party conversation among graduate students, who are talking about attending an upcoming conference.At line 10, Hong makes an RfC in asking his fellow students whether they are supposed to go to the conference individually, rather than as a group ("It shouldn't be the case that we go together, right?"). ah ku-ke-n (.) chamsekhayya-ci.

27
Won's topic-initially produced RfC is allusively formulated with demonstrative pronouns (ku-ttay "at that time" and ku-ke "that thing"), invoking a shared experience as the confirmable.In response, Jiho initiates repair at line 4, showing that he has a problem in identifying the referent, as indicated by the falling intonation (mwe."What.").Won responds by repairing the problem at line 5, still in a way that is highly allusive (cinanpen-ey:: "Last time").At line 6, Jiho marks the success of repair, by reciprocating with an allusive expression of his own ("Oh::: hh (you mean) that(h) thing, h").This pattern manifests the tendency to "over-suppose and under-tell," a practice through which allusive talk is used as a resource for measuring/confirming intimacy (K.Kim, 1999).Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012).The questioner's deontic orientation is often exhibited in the form of entertaining a conjecture about a plausible outcome of a normative reasoning proposed to be shared by the recipient as his/her co-member.Consider Extract (11), where four participants are eating lunch.As they start eating, Ari finds a food item covered by a wrapper in her plate, whose unfamiliar-looking feature catches the participants' attention.In response to Yun's query at line 1, Ari answers that it may be a dessert (line 10).She further says that, even though she unwrapped it to eat first, she hesitated to eat it because of the dubious character of the food being covered by a wrapper (lines 10, 13 and 15).This message is articulated through her RfC formatted with post-nominalization negation, with which she playfully inquiries about the likelihood of the wrapper being edible, too, indexing her pessimistic "conjecturing" stance (lines 19-20) ("It shouldn't be the case that we eat the whole thing (including the wrapper), right?").As in Extract (10), it is optimized for a confirmation/agreement, which is pursued more assertively with the use of the pseudo-tag cianha30: The pseudo-tag cianha (ci:NEG) is a form grammaticalized from the post-verbal negation ci + anh ('NEG') (Kawanish and Sohn, 1993).Compared with the post-verbal negation, it embodies a more assertive, less mitigated epistemic claim (K.Kim, 2022).The preceding observations suggest that post-nominalization negation RfCs, deriving their distancing function from the nominalizer nun-ke, are deployed as an "impersonalization" device fitted to the task of organizing a range of face-sensitive actions, manifesting features of an "impersonal deontic question" that does not specify "the bearer of the obligation or necessity" (Rossi and Zinken, 2016: e298).Their use enacts a context where the recipient is mobilized as a "co-member/evaluator" to appreciate, affiliate with, or otherwise "normalize" the questioner's variously "nuanced" conjecturing stances expressing norm-based concern, doubt, or counter-expectation.31 The deontic orientation of the questioner is exhibited, to varying extents, in the way the state of affairs being referenced in the confirmable is described as coming about through a "plausible" normative course of events that would be otherwise unlikely.
As shown in Extracts ( 9) and (11), the impersonalizing import of the postnominalization RfC may be exploited as a resource for engaging in "overplay" (Goffman, 1971), enacted as "mock-actions," e.g., with the target of the confirmable being externally positioned as the assessable to be lightheartedly co-evaluated by the recipient together with the questioner.In Extract (9), Won's concern, exhibited in his RfC, is formulated as a "mock-display" of his misgiving, geared to playfully mobilizing the participant's endorsement vis-à-vis their mutual friend's allegedly deviant practice.In Extract (11), Ari, with her RfC, accounts for her hesitancy in eating the food along with its wrapper by playing on the norm that wrappers are not to be eaten.That Ari is engaging in overplay as such is demonstrably registered by Byen (lines 21-22), who responds with mock-disconfirmation jokingly produced ("It's edible.Try it.hhhh").
When post-nominalization negation RfCs are used for challenging the recipient, their use draws upon shared knowledge invoked independent of the current context (see discussion above), which may be used as the standard against which the recipient's talk or action is challenged, e.g., shown to be discrepant or self-contradictory (cf.Küttner and Ehmer, to appear).Consider Extract (12).As Ryu says that he looks forward to buying a large-screen television when he moves into a new home, Min reminds him of his (Ryu's) earlier position that he did not buy the television because he wanted to have more time for studying.This point, which draws presumably upon a discourse history shared by Ryu and Min, is made through his RfC at lines 9-11 (ilpwule an sa-si-n-ke32 ani-eyyo?ku ce--kongpwu-ttaymwuney? "Isn't it the case that you didn't buy (the TV) on purpose because you wanted to study?").As Ryu minimally responds with disconfirmation at line 13 (ani-pnita "no"), Min relaunches his challenge by repeating and elaborating the prior RfC at lines 14-15.After a 0.8 second-long gap, Ryu backs down at line 17, conceding that that is what he intended to do ("At first, that's what I intended to do, but"), adding that that is the reason why he bought a small-screen TV in the first place (line 19): playfulness.This is interactionally accomplished through Ryu's allowing himself to be constituted as the butt of mock-tease initiated by Min (cf.Kim and Suh, 2021).While post-nominalization negation RfCs may be used for launching a "serious" challenging request, it seems to be the case that the "affordance" (Küttner and Ehmer, to appear) that they have as a device for formulating the target of the confirmable as an "entity" -about which the questioner and the recipient can take co-evaluative querying stance -predisposes their use to associated with various forms of playfully-enacted overplay of pro forma character.
Finally, it is to be noted that responses to post-nominalization RfCs tend to be brief or even virtually absent (see Extract (9)).The recipient often responds by "playing dumb" (Sacks, 1992) to the questioner's griping or complaint, particularly when it is formulated as a "mock" action having pro forma character.In such contexts, an earnest response would not be crucial, as long as the questioner's normative reasoning per se is something that the recipient can (or should) confirm or (playfully) disconfirm as a party sharing co-membership or a discourse history with the questioner (see Extracts (11) and ( 12)).
As a whole, the user of the post-nominalization negation RfC organizes his/her action as a form of "conjecture" grounded in normative reasoning, often exhibiting deontic orientations.33The "identificational" turn-compositional 33 In some contexts, post-verbal negation RfCs may serve as a reversed-polarity assertion, unequivocally optimized for confirmation/agreement (yes-like response), even without the use of a pseudo-tag (M.Kim, 2015b).In the data examined for this study, there is one such case, introduced below.In this context, Jiho is checking the scope of vocabulary that the students should know in preparing for an upcoming test.Note that his post-nominalization negation RfC at lines 1-2 makes a strong epistemic claim pursuing agreement, which is exhibited in the RfC's intonation at the ending that conveys prosodic emphasis, marked by elongation and diphthongization in the negation component (ani-eyyo → anyeyyo::): [um. "Yes." The deontic and non-personal character of Jiho's RfC can be noted in that the confirmable is formulated as concerning the current "state of affairs" (in which the TA's have to teach students a large number of vocabulary items in preparation for the upcoming test) feature constructs it as an "impersonalization" device, deployable in a way that the questioner is not personally accountable for the requesting action it implements (e.g., "Shouldn't it be the case that …?").This "impersonalizing" import derives from the "distancing" effect of the nominalizer nun-ke, which contributes to setting up a participation framework in which the questioner and the recipient are "externally positioned" aloof vis-à-vis the target of the confirmable.This feature offers itself as a resource that is usable in various ways for organizing a range of "mock actions," with the target of the confirmable being formulated as an assessable to be "co-evaluated" by the recipient on the basis of a shared normative reasoning.

Conclusion
The preceding analysis suggests that the three forms of negatively-formatted RfCs are interactionally motivated as a distinctive set of grammatical resources, whose methodic character is observed in terms of the nature of the confirmable, the types of sequence they engender, and the epistemic role relationships they enact.34Along the line of analysis proposed in this article, differences between three types of verbal negation can be clarified by comparing the following utterances (cf.Heritage, 2013: 377): (a) 배 안 고파? pay an kopha?"You're not hungry?,"(b) 배 고프지 않아? pay kophu-ci anh-a?"you're hungry, aren't you?/Aren't you hungry?," and (c) 배 고픈거 아니야? phay kophu-nke ani-ya?"Isn't it/shouldn't it be the case that you are hungry?." The pre-verbal negation RfC "배 안 고파?" is a "formulation" of the upshot of the prior/current context of talk allusively suggesting that the recipient is likely to be hungry, e.g., despite the appearance suggesting otherwise.The confirmable it poses is oriented to by the recipient as referencing an "allusive" aspect of his/her own domain (of sensation) inferentially accessible to by the questioner.The post-verbal negation RfC "배고프지 않아?" "problematizes" a state of affairs being the recipient's (or the participant's shared) domain, that is portrayed as having come about, in due course, none other than from the design of test questions (referred to with i-ke-l kaci-kwu "with this").This feature the RfC enables Jiho to obliquely lodge complaint about the test questions to Yun, the TA coordinator, in a way that is not personally accountable.

34
The findings are generally in line with Y. Park (2010) and Noh (2009), who argue that pre-verbal negation indexes the weakest epistemic claim, with post-verbal negation indexing the strongest, and the post-nominalization negation in between.However, as the preceding analysis suggests, differences between them cannot be fully captured in terms of degrees of epistemic strength alone.
Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2023 07:39:24AM via free access making a search for a solution a relevant next action (e.g., going out to grab something to eat) in a way that is acquiescent to "the questioner's own terms." The post-nominalization negation RfC "배 고픈 거 아니야?" exhibits the questioner's "conjecturing" stance grounded in a normative reasoning (e.g., hearing that the recipient's stomach is growling).The recipient is mobilized as a "co-evaluator/member" to appreciate or otherwise "normalize" questioner's norm-based concern displayed through the RfC.
In terms of the base or origo (Hanks, 2009) from which the relevance of the problem that the confirmable poses derives, the pre-verbal negation RfC is "hearer/other-relevant."The confirmable is formulated from the perspective of the recipient, who is constituted as a party who has hitherto been in lapse for having not attended to an "allusive" aspect of his/her own epistemic domain.The requesting action it organizes embodies the questioner's other-attentive orientation, vicariously displayed towards prompting the recipient to confirm "fittedness" of the proposed formulation to his/her domain, in his/her own terms.
The post-verbal negation RfC, by contrast, is "speaker/self-relevant."The problem brought up by the confirmable is posed from the perspective of the questioner, who sets the terms on which recipiency is pursued.Often embedded in contexts where the recipient's epistemic supremacy is put to the test, its use is oriented to as claiming acquiescence to the questioner's epistemic rights.Though mitigated by the turn design of a negative question, the recipient is frontally engaged, pressed to concede to or counter the questioner's de facto assertion in regard to an aspect of his/her epistemic domain being problematized on the latter's terms.
The post-nominalization negation RfC is, for its part, "speaker/memberrelevant."The problem posed by the confirmable is formulated from the speaker's normative perspective as a member.The questioner identifies the noted event/state of affairs as deviant or counter-expectational, set against normative standards, e.g., an established fact or normative course of events.Externally positioned vis-à-vis the confirmable formulated as an identifiable "entity," the recipient is mobilized as a member/evaluator to evaluate the noted deviancy on the terms of normative reasoning, which he/she is presumed to share with the questioner as a co-member.
In future research, negatively-formatted RfCs used in Korean conversation could be further analyzed from a cross-linguistic perspective.For instance, Heritage (2002) argues that, in English conversation, turn-initially positioned negative interrogatives render the questioner's challenging stance recognizable for recipients early in the turn's production, whereas, in tag questions, the "challenging" negative interrogative is relegated to the end of the turn Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2023 07:39:24AM via free access 10.1163/26660393-bja10079 | Contrastive PragmaticS (2023) 1-50 (Heritage, 2002(Heritage, : 1441(Heritage, -1442)).This issue could be further researched in comparison with the use of post-verbal negation RfCs in Korean (where the negative component is found at the end of the turn), whose "problematizing" import could be sequentially escalated into "challenging" one.It also brings up the relevance of a presence of the negative component in ci anh (in post-verbal negation RfCs) as opposed to absence in the pseudo-tag ci (or its "bleached" status in the pseudo-tag cianha (ci:NEG)), which both occur turn-finally.This merits further cross-linguistic study, in regard to how early in the turn's production challenges are made recognizable for recipients, i.e., through "early negative framing (as in English)" or through other means.35Furthermore, as Y. Park (2010) suggests, the question of how negative turn design interacts with sentence-ending suffixes merits detailed analytic attention (cf.Enfield, Brown, and de Ruiter, 2012).For instance, it would be interesting to examine in more detail how polarity markings interact with sentence-ending suffixes, not only with the committal SES ci in pseudo-tags, but also with "non-committal" suffixes, such as the dubitative SESs na or nka or noticing/inference-marking SESs ney or kwuna (Lee, 1991); they serve as linguistic signals contributing to modulating the questioner's epistemic claim, e.g., in the form of formulating the requesting action as ostensibly self-directed "musing aloud" or "noticing" (K.Kim, i.prep.), with the recipient being positioned as an "overhearer" (Goffman, 1979).
In conclusion, the patterns of use of the three forms of negatively-formatted RfCs observed in naturally-occurring interaction suggest some of the ways in which Korean language users closely orient to managing each other's negative face (Brown and Levinson, 1978).They are used as a resource for "doing being polite" through mitigating epistemic claim, or for engaging in "doing overplay" (Goffman, 1971) in formulating the requesting action as variously warranted (Drew and Couper-Kuhlen, 2014).The findings shed light on how the "interaction order" (Gofman, 1964) is oriented to and methodically accomplished in Korean interactional scenes, where requesting actions are routinely conducted in a way that is obliquely "other-attentive" and allusively "inference-rich" (Garfinkel, 1967).This would be one of the realms of language use where the relationships between grammar, interaction, and culture can be fruitfully explored, by paying empirical attention to the ways in which they are shaped by linguistic resources and interactional practices afforded by the grammar of the Korean language.

35
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing up this point.

Table 1
Negative polarity markings in Korean RfCs Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2023 07:39:24AM via free access 10.1163/26660393-bja10079 | Contrastive PragmaticS (2023) 1-50 post-nominalization negation.The overall distribution of the negativelyformatted RfCs is represented in Table 1: RfC, marked with the pseudo-tag particle ci,28 is unequivocally tilted towards confirmation/agreement.With his RfC, he invokes his reasoning (that they are supposed to go individually) as a "by-default" normative basis for making the inquiry about another (less likely) possibility (i.e., going together).The28When marked with a pseudo-tag (ci or cianha), a post-verbal or post-nominalization negation RfC becomes unequivocally optimized for confirmation (yes-like response), drawing upon the confirmation-seeking function of pseudo-tags (also see Extract (11) below).RfC can be noted,29 with the confirmable referencing what students "should" do in regard to the academic activity of attending at a conference (cf.
RfC emerges in the context where the participants are playfully engaging in identifying the food item at hand.With her RfC, Ari raises a question about the dubious nature of the food at hand by formulating it as discrepant with the normative knowledge that a wrapper normally is not, or should not be, edible.
Note that the challenging import of Min's RfCs is in the service of organiz- 32The form (u)n-ke is a variant of nun-ke that indexes past tense.Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2023 07:39:24AM via free access 10.1163/26660393-bja10079 | Contrastive PragmaticS (2023) 1-50 ing the requesting action as a "mock-tease."Ryu's initial response to Min's first RfC -straightforward disconfirmation (line 13) -and his subsequent backdown (made in the form of partial confirmation) (line 17) in response to Min's recycled RfC -contributes to endowing the sequence with humor and Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2023 07:39:24AM via free access