From connective to final particle: Korean tunci “or” and cross-linguistic comparisons

Building on previous studies on turn-final uses of English or and Swedish eller “or”, this study argues that in turn-final position, tunci, or, and eller share a core function: they can relax the preference organization in conversational interactions and allow the addressee to utter a dispreferred response more freely. This is a new “intersubjectified” function that the connectives do not have when they combine two conjuncts (Traugott 2014).