UCLA

This dissertation aims to discover the systematic properties of ‘knowledge-testing’ questions (KQs) to broaden our understanding of the action of knowledge-testing accomplished via questions. The data of this study consist of 190 KQs obtained from cross-examinations among political candidates in 116 Korean political campaign debates (155 hours and 23 minutes in total). The defining features, emergence, and compositional forms of KQs are explored in great detail using the methodological and analytic framework of conversation analysis (CA).

To clearly define KQs, this study examines the interactional functions of KQs, and their production and recognition as KQs during the cross-examinations. The findings show that candidates use KQs to discredit their opponents and expose their ignorance of the subject of inquiry while promoting their own knowledgeability. Candidates also utilize linguistic, sequential/interactional, and broad social resources for action formation and ascription of KQs and can retrospectively transform the action import of KQs.

The investigation of the emergence of KQs during the cross-examinations show that they occur in three distinctive but potentially co-existing contexts: (a) where candidates have good reason to believe that the respondents are vulnerable to KQs, (b) where candidates are involved in undermining their opponents’ policies/promises/claims, and (c) where candidates fail to provide the correct answers to the KQs issued by their opponents earlier and subsequently attempt to show that their opponents have the same weakness as themselves regarding a domain of knowledge. Candidates therefore find KQs to be a useful debate tool to primarily expose their opponents’ ignorance, which can serve as a basis for undermining their opponents’ promises/claims or doing damage control via counterattack. The different sequential contexts contribute to diversifying the import of KQs as a political campaign debate strategy and point to the close relationship between sequential position and action import.

The compositional forms of the KQs are analyzed by identifying the parameters (or dimensions) that explain linguistic variation in KQ design and the import delivered by each KQ format in testing knowledge. This study identifies two parameters of KQ design and their respective formats: the epistemic parameter accounting for nine types of KQ formats, and the precision parameter accounting for three types of KQ formats. The nine epistemic KQ formats convey different degrees of expectation towards the likelihood of the opponents’ knowing the answers, which range from strongest pessimism to strongest optimism. The three precision formats realize to varying degrees how precise an answer the KQs will accept. Acceptable answers as conveyed by these formats range from approximate to precise and accurate. The sequential and frequency analyses of the epistemic and precision formats show the variation in their surface forms to be an accountable and systematic phenomenon geared towards maximizing the effectiveness of KQs as a linguistic device for testing the opponents’ knowledge and proving their ignorance.

As a rare conversation analytic study providing a detailed and comprehensive analysis of KQs used in political campaign debates—a type of question crucial in constituting various forms of institutional interactions such as pedagogical interactions, news interviews with political candidates, job interviews, and legal proceedings, this dissertation adds to our understanding of the institutional uses of KQs, linguistic strategies for political campaign debates, and question design in Korean, thereby contributing to the fields of conversational analysis, political communication, and linguistics.