On the face-threat attenuating functions of Korean com: implications for internal and external dialogic processing in interaction

Abstract Pragmatic markers are linguistic resources, many of them highly ubiquitous, that provide speakers with a means to display their stance toward a given proposition and, at the same time, toward their fellow interlocutors and others. Using naturally-occurring spoken data from the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we examine the role of Korean pragmatic marker com as an interactional resource for stance management in conversation. We integrate a ‘stance triangle’ framework and a dialogicality model that involves both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ dialogic processes, and analyze how Korean com is recruited as a face-threat mitigator to attenuate the assertive force of a speaker’s utterance in a variety of conversational contexts. Our findings indicate that the use of com is frequently motivated by sociocultural values, reframed as politeness norms, which prompt speakers to modulate their position in ways that mitigate face-loss for both themselves and others. We thus propose an expanded version of the ‘stance triangle’ for situations involving mitigation acts whereby, in potentially dis-aligning contexts, the speaker’s external positioning toward the stance object often does not directly nor fully reflect their internal evaluation, indicating a frequent desire among fellow interlocutors to preserve solidarity with each other.