Abstract
Conversational repair is the process people use to detect and resolve problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Through repair, participants in social interaction display how they establish and maintain communication and mutual understanding. We argue that repair provides a crucial theoretical interface for research between diverse approaches to studying human interaction. We provide an overview of conversation analytic findings about repair in order to encourage further cross‐disciplinary research involving both detailed inductive inquiry and more theory‐driven experimental approaches. We outline CA's main typologies of repair and its methodological rationale, and we provide transcripts and examples that readers can explore for themselves using open data from online corpora. Since participants in interaction use repair to deal with problems as they emerge at the surface level of talk, we conclude that repair can be a point of convergence for studying mis/communication from multiple methodological perspectives.
Highlights
Imagine a world without methods to deal with miscommunication
Schegloff (1992) describes third position repair as the “last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation” because it is at this point in a sequence that the problems revealed to the speaker by the recipient’s response can—if unchecked— lead to a breakdown in mutual understanding that escapes beyond the local structure of a sequence
Repair can function as a theoretical interface for cross-disciplinary research between conversation analysis (CA) and cognitive approaches to human interaction
Summary
Imagine a world without methods to deal with miscommunication. In this world, if some coordination problem emerged in the course of a joint activity—building a very tall tower, for example—it might take so long to fix that in the process of resolving one problem, more problems would have time to emerge. This paper aims to dispel that view by showing how CA’s methodological rationale is designed to remain focused on practical interactional problems at the surface of talk, and how people work to maintain intersubjectivity on a moment-by-moment basis. This approach makes CA an especially useful approach to miscommunication. Miscommunication and shared understanding “Miscommunication” is a paradoxical concept from a CA perspective because it is the very methods people use to repair problems in interaction that provide CA (and participants in interaction) with the best evidence that communication has been successfully achieved. CA describes this as a principle of “progressivity” (Robinson, 2014; Zama & Robinson, 2016) whereby if the interaction progresses without ostensible misunderstandings being flagged up, participants will proceed as though shared understanding has been achieved
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