Abstract
This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation—when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk—into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair accompanies their turn with a “hold”—when relatively dynamic movements are temporarily and meaningfully held static—this position will not be disengaged until the problem is resolved and the sequence closed. We base this finding on qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora of conversational interaction from three unrelated languages representing two different modalities: Northern Italian, the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador, and Argentine Sign Language. The cross-linguistic similarities uncovered by this comparison suggest that visual bodily practices have been semiotized for similar interactive functions across different languages and modalities due to common pressures in face-to-face interaction.
Highlights
Repair and Visual Bodily Behavior The domain of “repair” covers a range of practices that people use to deal with problems of “speaking, hearing and understanding” in interaction
To test our predictions about hold timing using quantitative methods, we identified a sample set of cases of repair sequences in each of our three corpora—defined by the sequential structure outlined in the previous section— to take timing measurements
As discussed in more detail below in Sequences Without Holds, the higher rate of holds is related to the fact that joint visual attention is usually a prerequisite for holds in other-initiated repair (OIR) sequences, and this is more constant in sign language interaction as compared to spoken languages
Summary
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline. com/hdsp. Repair initiation is a question-like action that expects the provision of a solution in position Such an action suspends the progressivity of the ongoing sequence, displacing the appropriate turn with an OIR sequence (an “insert sequence” when the trouble source is a first pair part; Schegloff, 2007) that must be completed before the main sequence can be resumed or closed. Speaker B turns his head toward speaker A when producing the repair initiator in T0 and turns away when resuming progressivity after T þ 1 This is the general structure of all cases included in the sample we consider in this article, with the qualification that in some cases speaker B may treat the first repair solution (or lack thereof) as unsuccessful, and so may engage in “pursuit” (Bolden, Mandelbaum, & Wilkinson, 2012; Pomerantz, 1984) with one or more T0 repair initiations (see Holds in Pursuit Sequences, below). The hold includes a manual sign articulated with the right hand, the interrogative pronoun “what,” which is held stationary together with the nonmanual signs and head position until after the repair solution
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