A high boundary tone as a resource for a social action: The Korean sentence-ender –ta

The Korean sentence-ender –ta has been studied in linguistics as a grammatical element marking declarative sentences. Contributing to recent studies that have proposed –ta's functions in discourse, this study examines –ta's different boundary tones and argues that they allow speakers to perform different social actions in naturally occurring conversation. Based upon conversation analysis of video- and audio-recorded conversations, this article demonstrates that speakers, by using –ta in a high boundary tone, display the conveyed information as announceable and newsworthy, thereby highlighting newness of the information. Due to these characteristics, -ta utterances are overwhelmingly found in pre-telling sequences in which speakers announce news and within telling sequences in which speakers provide information that they believe is tellable for the development of a telling. By taking into account a boundary tone mapped onto a specific sentence-ender and analyzing in detail naturally occurring interaction with access to non-verbal interaction, the study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of prosody and interaction.