Stancetaking in the face of incongruity in Korean conversation

•The paper examines stancetaking in the face of incongruity in Korean conversation.•Incongruity between a claim and its factual grounds can lead to disagreement.•Incongruity between reality and expectation can be a source of humor.•A nominalized negation construction serves as a stance marker in these environments.

This paper investigates the stances that Korean speakers routinely take in conversation when facing incongruities in reality, facts, and expectations, and it identifies the roles these stances play in everyday social interaction. The paper focuses on the use of the nominalized negation construction –nun ke ani– (‘It is not the case/fact’) as a stance marker. A conversation analysis of this construction shows that it does more than simply acting as a negation device. It frequently acts as a reversed polarity assertion (‘It is the case/The fact is/The thing is’), and depending on its interactional and sequential environment, it accomplishes different interactional outcomes in stancetaking activity. In disagreement sequences, speakers actively employ nun ke ani as a device to contradict a claim by evoking a fact or truth that counters an assumption on which the claim is based. In other contexts, speakers may also use it to interject humor by highlighting a fact or reality that goes against expectation. The study illustrates how a language form can function in the service of stancetaking, and at the same time how stancetaking activity shapes the language form itself.