When 'others' initiate repair

Abstract

Early work on repair (Schegloff et al. 1977) had proposed that virtually all repair initiated by other than speaker of the trouble-source turn was initiated in the turn following the trouble-source turn. Such repair often came to be identified with this locus of initiation, being termed NTRI-an acronym derived from 'next turn repair initiation'. Subsequent work (Schegloff 1992) described another location in which 'other-initiated repair' is initiated-termed 'fourth position'. This paper revisits this issue and elaborates the locus of other-initiated repair. It reports on a number of environments in which 'others' initiate repair in turns later than the one directly following the trouble-source turn (without, however, occupying fourth position), and it describes several ways in which other-initiation of repair which occurs in next-turn position may be delayed within that position. These positionings of repair initiation in conversation among native speakers of English are briefly compared with a proposal by Wong that other-initiated repair by non-native speakers may regularly be delayed. A postscript suggests the prospect that studies of non-native speaker participation in talk-in-interaction be treated as not separable from the study of talk-in-interaction more generally