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
Summary
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..
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