Chapter published in:
OKAY across Languages: Toward a comparative approach to its use in talk-in-interaction
Edited by Emma Betz, Arnulf Deppermann, Lorenza Mondada and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 34] 2021
► pp. 2–28

Chapter 1
Introduction

OKAY emerging as a cross-linguistic object of study in prior research

| University of Waterloo
| University of Helsinki
This chapter sets the context for the articles in the volume – explorations in the use of OKAY in a diverse set of languages, including American English, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, and Swedish. We first outline the origins of OKAY in American English and its spread to other languages as a loanword, motivating this study of OKAY. We then review the state of the art in research on OKAY in spoken interaction in a variety of settings. Since this volume makes a case for investigating OKAY empirically as it is actually used in particular occasions of spoken and embodied interaction, the review of existing work on OKAY will be connected to relevant developments in Conversation Analysis (Sidnell 2010; Clift 2016) and Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018). We close with a discussion of overarching themes and promising new research directions that emerge from existing work.
Article outline
  • 1.Origin and early spread of OKAY
  • 2.What can we glean from sources on the history of OK about its early uses?
  • 3.The emergence of OKAY as a research topic in conversation analysis
  • 4.Research on OKAY in institutional discourse and elicited interaction
  • 5.Questions and research directions emerging from existing work on OKAY
  • Notes
Published online: 17 March 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.34.01bet