Negotiating epistemic rights to information in Korean conversation: An examination of the Korean evidential marker – tamye

Abstract

This study uses conversation analysis to investigate how participants in Korean conversations negotiate their epistemic rights to information by deploying alternate evidential markers. The participants mutually monitor each other’s different or changing epistemic rights to the information and routinely shift their choice of evidential markers to —tamye (‘I hear, isn’t it true?’) to redistribute their epistemic rights. By manipulating the turn-taking and sequence organizations which underlie the —tamye evidential marker, the participants can claim or downgrade their epistemic rights to the information. The findings of this study contribute to research on evidentiality by providing an interactional perspective which takes the orientation of the participants in actual interactions as the starting point of analysis. The study illustrates how evidential markers serve to negotiate the relationships among the speaker, the hearer, and the information in the course of the interaction rather than merely function to reflect an implicit contract or territory between the speaker’s and the hearer’s information.