Chapter 6 - Repair and Cooperation in Conversation

Abstract

This chapter discusses repair and cooperation in conversation. In developing an interface, a designer makes use of whichever pragmatic theories that are best suited to the task at hand. There are many different theories to choose from, but, in a rather crude way, they can all be placed into one of two groups: (1) those which work with a very narrow view of what utterances contain, presume that the hearer can make a large number of assumptions about the speech situation, and propose that the hearer is able and willing to do an excessive amount of inferential work in interpreting an utterance; and (2) those approaches that stress the wealth of detail. The main empirical content of this chapter is a single brief interchange between a thought disordered schizophrenic and a clinical psychologist. The occasional speech errors of the normal speaker and the chronic language deficits of the aphasic have both provided valuable data for the construction and evaluation of psycholinguistic models of normal phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic processes. The restriction of this research strategy to these levels is probably as much a matter of historical accident as of reasoned choice. For this reason, it is likely that the specific difficulties that arise in conversations with thought disordered schizophrenics might be particularly interesting. Amongst these difficulties is a sense one gains that the schizophrenic participant in a conversation is not being particularly helpful or cooperative.