Conversational Repair

Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction and talk-in-interaction that, although rooted in the sociological study of everyday life, has exerted significant influence across the humanities and social sciences including linguistics. Drawing on recordings (both audio and video) naturalistic interaction (unscripted, non-elicited, etc.) conversation analysts attempt to describe the stable practices and underlying normative organizations of interaction by moving back and forth between the close study of singular instances and the analysis of patterns exhibited across collections of cases. Four important domains of research within conversation analysis are turn-taking, repair, action formation and ascription, and action sequencing.

G Drawing on the methods of conversation analysis (Sidnell, 2010; Sidnell and Stivers, 2012) and the data provided by recordings of ordinary interaction, in this paper I ask what a radically empirical approach to word meaning might look like. Specifi cally, I explore the possibility that we might investigate linguistic meaning through a consideration of interactional troubles. Th at is, when participants in interaction confront apparent troubles of meaning, what do those troubles consist in? What is the missing something that leaves participants in interaction feeling as though they do not understand what another means? Four types of trouble in interaction are discussed: troubles of exophoric or anaphoric reference, troubles of common ground, troubles of lexical meaning, troubles of sense.

В статье на материале тридцати случайно отобранных фрагментов интервью показано реальное устройство вопрос-ответной коммуникации между респондентом и интервьюером. Это сделано с целью демонстрации механики производства итоговых кодировок, которые используются для построения финальных распределений и служат предметом анализа для сотрудников опросных центров. Общение интервьюера с респондентом представлено в виде процесса ситуативного создания информации, которая в итоге будет названа данными. Любые формальные установления, призванные стандартизировать процесс интервью, в ходе разговора изменяются, дорабатываются или вовсе отбрасываются в качестве непригодных для коммуникации здесь и сейчас. Участие в этом процессе интервьюера и респондента осуществляется неравноправно. Респондент исходит исключительно из собственного здравого смысла и не имеет представления о том, какого вида ответы от него ожидают. Интервьюер, напротив, вполне представляет себе, чтό это должны быть за ответы, чтобы быть адекватными поставленным перед ним задачам. Задачи же сводятся главным образом к редукции реального нарратива до такого состояния, при котором сказанное может быть статистически проанализировано. Такая редукция фактически и составляет суть механики интервью, производящей ситуативно адекватные ответы. В статье приведены три стратегии такой редукции, которых в процессе первоначального рендеринга может быть несколько.

This article is concerned with the ways in which the students and the teacher in a content- based German as a foreign language class used repairin order to negotiate meaning and form
in their classroom. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, we discuss how repair in this institutional setting differed from repair in mundane conversation and how repair was used differently by the students and the teacher. Given that students and the teacher were all competent speakers of both the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), we found that these differences were not merely indications of incomplete L2 usage. Instead, they manifested how the students and the teacher enacted and perceived their respective roles within the classroom and, based on role concepts, demonstrated different access to repair as a resource. The analysis shows that repair is a resource for modified output as well as modified input in classroom settings.

This article examines how conversational repair is organized in the reduced communicative channel of whistled speech in San Pedro Sochiapam Chinantec of Oaxaca, Mexico. It argues that studies of language channeled through different modalities affect our understanding of human lan- guage more generally. While repair in whistled speech shares the same universal sequence organ- ization as repair in spoken speech, there are noteworthy differences in the preference organization and the typology of repair in whistled speech: a reduction in the types of repair initiations; a lack of preference for self-initiated repair; and an inversion of the frequency relation of open and re- stricted repairs to favor open formats. I propose that these patterned differences are motivated by a reduced semiotic carrying capacity of the whistled channel.*

As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.

Adopting the methods of Conversation Analysis, this paper explores the sequence organisation and the linguistic and embodied resources mobilized by the interactants in the incremental pursuit of shared understanding (i.e. intersubjectivity). More specifically, the present paper focuses on the most familiar classroom sequence organisation, i.e., the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) exchange (Mehan, 1979), in two Italian as a Second Language (L2) university classrooms.
This paper concentrates on a particular organization of the IRE, namely an insert expansion sequence (Schegloff, 2007). It is argued that within the IRE sequential environment – overwhelmingly occurring during form-and-accuracy phases of the lessons (Seedhouse, 2004) – such insert expansions represent a locus for the public display of (mis-)understanding and for a repair opportunity space to arise. The analysis also demonstrates that the insert expansion, which is here termed ‘Pre-Evaluation insert sequence’ (Pre-E), structurally provides the teacher with the possibility to attend to the procedural contingencies of the assessment practice, before implementing her third turn (E).

Based on video recorded Italian L2 university classroom interactions, and using Conversation Analysis, this paper explores the situated practices through which co-participants incrementally and collaboratively achieve mutual understanding. The study aims to broaden and problematize our understanding of reparative work in L2 classrooms, and its import on the sequential organization of interaction. In particular, the analysis explores a specific device, namely the teacher’s polar interrogative siete d’accordo?  (SDA) deployed by the teacher in Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences (Mehan, 1979).
It is argued that SDA lays the ground for an other-initiated repair that is brought to completion by students chorally (Lerner, 1993; Mehan, 1979), or by a student other than the trouble-source speaker. Furthermore, the analysis shows that SDA is a multifunctional device which systematically (i) defers the teacher’s assessment by reorienting the momentum of the IRE sequence, (ii) launches an insert pre-evaluation sequence which expands the basic IRE exchange, (iii) operates on the turn-taking system as it opens up the conversational floor to other participants (either the whole class or another student), (iv) makes the students share the accountability of the teacher’s assessment practice, and (v) secures the students’ involvement in taking a stance toward the assessment of a peer response.
Lastly, the sequential analysis attempts to uncover the local interpretive resources upon which participants rely in order to understand SDA as a device for triggering the pursuit, the restoration, and the interactional achievement of intersubjectivity through repair.