Abstract
AbstractThis article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha’palaa (a Barbacoan language spoken in north-western Ecuador). Special attention is given to the relation of repair formats to the morphosyntactic and intonational systems of the language. It examines the distinctive falling intonation observed with interjections and content question formats and the pattern of a held mid-high tone observed in polarity questions, as well as the function of Cha’palaa grammatical features such as the case marking system, the nominal classifiers and the verb classification system as formats for repair initiation. It considers a selection of examples from a video corpus to illustrate a broad range of sequence types of opened and restricted other-initiated repair, noting that Cha’palaa had the highest relative rate of open repair in the cross-linguistic sample. It also considers the extension of OIR to other practices such as news uptake and disagreement in the Cha’palaa corpus.
Highlights
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha’palaa
Repair practices are a good choice for this kind of ‘pragmatic typology’ (Dingemanse et al 2014; Dingemanse and Floyd 2014) because speakers of any language will have to deal with problems of producing and perceiving or understanding in one way or another, and we can observe similar types of repair sequences across different languages
Open repair initiators have falling intonation, as illustrated above, and this appears to be related to the intonation associated with content questions in contrast with that associated with polarity questions
Summary
The Cha’palaa language is spoken by the Chachi people in small communities and households along the rivers of the Ecuadorian Province of Esmeraldas between the Andean foothills and the Pacific coast. The language marks a number of knowledgebased values in the evidential and epistemic domains with a range of different suffixes This typological profile is significant for the study of practices of repair for a number of reasons. The fact that values such as person need not be overtly conveyed helps to structure the kinds of ambiguities that may arise, potentially leading to repair sequences in which participants attempt to resolve them (e.g. by asking “Who?”). Some examples of such sequences are shown . Other elements of Cha’palaa’s linguistic system, including its aspects of its morphological and intonational systems, turn out to be relevant for other-initiated repair, and will be discussed along with the description of the OIR system
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