earticle

영어

Korean telephone conversations havedrawn some attention albeit not extensively. However, few have paid criticallyanalytic attention to adjacency pair sequences in Korean telephone call closings,one of the key constructs in Conversation Analysis (CA). For this reason, thepresent study examines the applicability of the adjacency pair to Korean telephonecall closings. To do so, it presents some counterevidence against the applicabilityof the unrevised notion of adjacency pair. First, the closing sequence in Koreanis neither lexically repetitive nor interactionally reciprocal like that in the (NorthAmerican) canonical format due to the consistent occurrence of"acknowledgement tokens" (Jefferson, 1984), which do not constitute a part ofa legitimate adjacency pair (Deng, 2008). Second, some Korean telephone callclosings have "three-part exchanges" (Tsui, 1989). The evidence against anadjacency pair in favor of a three-part exchange hinders a direct application ofthe adjacency-pair model to Korean telephone call closings. Subsequently, thepresent study revisits Han's (1998) theoretically uncritical, yet otherwiseilluminating study in light of the two findings above. It points out the problemswith the quantification of adjacency pairs in Korean telephone call closingsbecause her study takes into account neither acknowledgement tokens northree-part exchanges. Overall, then, the present study illustrates that the adjacencypair in Korean telephone call closings might not be the best microanalyticconstruct to explain the closing data. The theoretical and pedagogical implicationsof the findings are also discussed.