Kim, Ki-tae. 2014. Problems of the adjacency pair in Korean telephone conversation closings. Language Information 18. 05-26. Korean telephone conversations have drawn some attention albeit not extensively. However, few have paid critically analytic attention to adjacency pair sequences in Korean telephone call closings, one of the key constructs in Conversation Analysis (CA). For this reason, the present study examines the applicability of the adjacency pair to Korean telephone call closings. To do so, it presents some counterevidence against the applicability of the unrevised notion of adjacency pair. First, the closing sequence in Korean is neither lexically repetitive nor interactionally reciprocal like that in the (North American) canonical format due to the consistent occurrence of "acknowledgement tokens" (Jefferson, 1984), which do not constitute a part of a legitimate adjacency pair (Deng, 2008). Second, some Korean telephone call closings have "three-part exchanges" (Tsui, 1989). The evidence against an adjacency pair in favor of a three-part exchange hinders a direct application of the adjacency-pair model to Korean telephone call closings. Subsequently, the present study revisits Han's (1998) theoretically uncritical, yet otherwise illuminating study in light of the two findings above. It points out the problems with the quantification of adjacency pairs in Korean telephone call closings because her study takes into account neither acknowledgement tokens nor three-part exchanges. Overall, then, the present study illustrates that the adjacency pair in Korean telephone call closings might not be the best microanalytic construct to explain the closing data. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.
Key words: adjacency pairs, telephone calls, telephone conversations, telephone call closings, Conversation Analysis, CA