Abstract

AbstractThe practices of other-initiation of repair provide speakers with a set of solutions to one of the most basic problems in conversation: troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Based on a collection of 227 cases systematically identified in a corpus of English conversation, this article describes the formats and practices of other-initiations of repair attested in the corpus and reports their quantitative distribution. In addition to straight other-initiations of repair, the identification of all possible cases also yielded a substantial proportion in which speakers use other-initiations to perform other actions, including non-serious actions, such as jokes and teases, preliminaries to dispreferred responses, and displays of surprise and disbelief. A distinction is made between otherinitiations that perform additional actions concurrently and those that formally resemble straight other-initiations but analyzably do not initiate repair as an action.

Highlights

  • Nowhere has other-initiated repair been studied more than in English conversation

  • If the candidate repair does not differ from the trouble source, it may be heard as a repeat, but if it alters or transforms the trouble source in some way, the result is a so-called ‘candidate understanding’, whereby the speaker checks whether he or she has adequately understood the trouble source

  • In addition to candidate understandings that appear to be the output of a single primary operation, such as those presented in the preceding sections, the corpus includes cases that cannot be described in such terms

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Nowhere has other-initiated repair been studied more than in English conversation. For more than 35 years, since the landmark study by Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977), conversation analysts have scrupulously documented the practices that speakers of English use to resolve troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding (e.g., saying what? if one has not heard or understood a prior turn; see Kitzinger, 2013, for a review of the literature). In his reflections on quantification in conversationanalytic research, Schegloff (1993) considered whether one could apply quantitative methods to the study of other-initiated repair. He concluded that one could, but whether or not one should remained unclear to him. The current study, the first quantitative survey of the practices of other-initiation of repair in English, is addressed to this very question..

The corpus and collection
The structure of OIR sequences
Minimal OIR sequences
Non-minimal OIR sequences
The practices of other-initiation of repair
Category-specific interrogatives
Interrogative words as complete TCUs
Jam: Have you heard of that one?
Interrogative words with partial repeats
Repeats of the trouble source
Partial repeats
Full repeats
Incomplete repeats
Copular interrogatives
Mom: Who:?
Candidate understandings
Replacement
Continuation
Tra: Some of the stuff- some of the stuff they’ve
Insertion
Complex candidate understandings
Other practices
Other-corrections
Complex other-initiations of repair
Bodily-visual practices
The quantitative distribution of OIR practices
Distribution of OIR practices in English
Distribution of OIR types in English for the comparative study
The actions of other-initiations of repair
The contrast between OIR and pseudo OIR
Liz: God if I’d have known I was gonna be on camera
Preliminaries to dispreferred responses
Displays of surprise and disbelief
10 Kel: Yea::h
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
Paper version not known

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call