ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to explain common patterns of assessment sequences in Korean conversation and to suggest their pedagogical applications. This article focuses on the sentence-ending (SE) suffixes -ney and -ci and their roles in marking assessments expressing affiliation and speakers' access to knowledge (Ha, 2018; Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Pomerantz, 1984; Stivers, 2008). Unlike in English, where speakers utilize semantic upgrades/downgrades and repeats to express their epistemic dominancy, the SE suffixes are the main resources by which Korean speakers mark their epistemic positions in assessment sequences (Ha, 2018; Hayano, 2011; Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Pomerantz, 1984). Studying the syntactic structures and the use of the SE suffixes offers Korean language learners a greater awareness of their use of expressions of affiliation, syntactic structuring of assessments, expressions of access to knowledge, and ways to initiate and respond to social actions.
