ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of interactional linguistic research conducted in Asian languages, focusing on Korean with additional discussion on Japanese. Building on the rigorous research methodology of conversation analysis, interactional linguistic research investigates language through detailed analysis of how participants themselves systematically deploy linguistic resources in the service of actions and activities as they implement them on a moment-by-moment basis in unfolding talk-in-interaction. This chapter shares some of the latest Korean and Japanese interactional linguistic research, in particular on repair practices, topic and subject particles, and the response token okay. These studies illustrate how linguistic forms can be (re)examined from the conversation analytic and interactional linguistic perspective, thereby widening our understanding of functions and usages of linguistic forms that have been underexplored or undetected by research limited to the sentence level. These studies also use multimodal transcripts and analyses to identify and examine embodiment and to make sense of the ways participants see and use their bodies in interaction, thus demonstrating how interactional linguistic research contributes to discovering how language and bodily action work together.
