Agreement as relational work in Korean conversation

This study examines agreement as relational work in Korean dyadic discussion. Adopting a relational-work perspective, it treats (im)politeness as sequentially accomplished through stance practices rather than as a property of honorific forms. The corpus comprises ten Korean dyads (20 speakers; 7567 turns) discussing two public topics. Stance tokens were quantitatively coded across age configuration, gender composition and acquaintance, then qualitatively analysed for turn design and sequential function. Agreement was far more frequent than disagreement (1162 vs. 263 turns), with systematic distributional differences: near-age dyads showed the densest agreement, gender configuration patterned stance distributions, and stranger dyads produced more overt agreement than acquainted dyads. Disagreement was comparatively infrequent and typically mitigated, delayed or concessively formatted rather than produced as bare opposition. Qualitative analysis shows that agreement is not a single action type but recurrently serves (i) epistemic self-positioning, where speakers align while claiming or ceding epistemic rights, and (ii) supportive reinforcement, where speakers collaboratively thicken a shared stance through rephrasings, examples, affective displays and echoic designs. The findings support analysing Korean (im)politeness as situated relational work accomplished through sequentially organised stance practices, complementing form-centred accounts of honorific politeness with strategy-level interactional evidence.