Abstract
AbstractThis article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana. Other-initiated repair is the set of techniques used by people to deal with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Formats for repair initiation in Siwu exploit language-specific resources like question words and noun class morphology. At the same time, the basic structure of the system bears a strong similarity to other-initiated repair in other languages. Practices described for Siwu thus are potentially of broader relevance to the study of other-initiated repair. This article documents how different prosodic realisations of repair initiators may index social actions and features of the speech event; how two distinct roles of repetition in repair initiators are kept apart by features of turn design; and what kinds of items can be treated as ‘dispensable’ in resayings. By charting how other-initiated repair uses local linguistic resources and yet is shaped by interactional needs that transcend particular languages, this study contributes to the growing field of pragmatic typology: the study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them.
Highlights
The Siwu languageSiwu is spoken in 8 villages in the Akpafu and Lolobi traditional areas north and north-east of Hohoe in Ghana’s Volta Region
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana
By describing other-initiated repair in Siwu, this article contributes to the description of the linguistic structure of Siwu, and to the emerging field of pragmatic typology: the comparative study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them (Dingemanse, Blythe, and Dirksmeyer 2014)
Summary
Siwu is spoken in 8 villages in the Akpafu and Lolobi traditional areas north and north-east of Hohoe in Ghana’s Volta Region. Considered part of the typological-geographical grouping of Togorestsprachen (Togo Remnant Languages), it belongs to the na-Togo branch of Kwa. Siwu (ISO 639-3: akp) is spoken by about 15,000 people, who call themselves the Mawu and their land Kawu. While the earliest lexical records of Siwu go back over a century, work on phonology and morphosyntax is more recent: there are sketch grammars of Siwu as spoken in Lolobi (Ford and Iddah 1973) and Akpafu (Dingemanse 2011 Ch. 5), and Bible translation work by GILLBT (a local branch of SIL International) has resulted in some work on phonological and grammatical topics. The current study is based on Siwu as spoken in Akpafu-Mempeasem
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