REPAIRS AND OVERALL ORGANISATION OF CONVERSATIONS
Repair is a generic term used in CA to cover a wide range of phenomena, from seeming errors in turn-taking, such as overlapping talk, to any of the forms of what is commonly called 'corrections' - that is, substantive faults in the contents of what someone has said.
The area of repair has generated a large amount of work in CA, the aim being that of showing how repair illustrates participants' orientations to the basic turn-taking rules. There are two main ways in which this is done:
First,
the turn-taking itself, as Schegloff,
speaker tends to stop speaking before the completion of a first turn-construction unit.
Second, CA has identified a certain organization of repairs done by participants in conversation.
I. THE ORGANISATION OF REPAIRS
There is a large variety of problems in conversations:
incorrect word selection,
slips of tongue
mis-hearings
misunderstandings 242f55c
However, the analytic strategy of CA was to identify and describe the general properties of an organisation for repair which allows participants to deal with the whole range of troubles. It is for this reason why the term repair is preferred to that of 'correction'.
Repair types
(All the examples and interpretations below are taken from Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998:61-63)
The repair system embodies a distinction between the initiation of repair (marking something as a source of trouble), and the actual repair itself. There is also a distinction between repair initiated by self (the speaker who produced the trouble source), and repair initiated by other. Consequently, there are four varieties of repair:
Self-initiated self-repair. Repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source.
E.g.:
I: Is it flu: you've got?
N: No I don't think- I refuse to have all these things
Here speaker N starts to produce an answer to the question ('No I don't think-') and then terminates that in mid-production in order to instead assert 'I refuse to have all these things'.
Other-initiated self-repair. Repair is carried out by the speaker of the trouble source but initiated by the recipient.
E.g.:
Ken: Is Al here today?
Dan: Yeah.
(2.0)
Roger: he is? Hh eh heh
Dan: Well he is.
Roger's turn (4) is an example of what is called a 'next-turn' repair initiator (NTRI). Other NTRIs may be words like 'What?', or even non-verbal gestures, such as a quizzical look.
NTRIs perform several tasks in interaction. Consider the following extract, in which NTRI takes the form of partial repeat of prior turn:
1 A: Hey (.) the first time they stopped me from selling cigarettes was this morning.
(1.)
.→B: From selling cigarettes?
A: Or buying cigarettes.
In this case it transpires that the first speaker has made a 'slip of the tongue'. However, the co-participants do not simply proffer the correct word. Nor do they explicitly announce that a mistake has been made. They provide a partial repeat of the prior turn and thereby recycle the trouble source. The first speaker, then, can infer that there was a problem connected to his earlier utterance, and the partial repeat of the earlier turn identifies for them the precise source of trouble. Furthermore, as a trouble source has been identified but nor repaired, the possibility is offered for the speaker who has produced the trouble source to repair it.
Self-initiated other-repair. The speaker of a trouble source may try and get the recipient to repair the trouble - for example if a name is proving troublesome to remember.
E.g.:
In the following example the first speaker's reference to his trouble remembering someone's name initiates the second speaker's repair.
1 B: He
had this uh Mistuh W-m whatever, I can't think of his first name,
2 A: / Dan Watts.
Other-initiated other-repair. The recipient of a trouble-source turn both initiates and carries out the repair. This is closest to what is conventionally understood by 'correction'.
E.g.:
In the following example there is an explicit correction which is then acknowledged and accepted in the subsequent turn:
Milly: and then they said something about Kruschev has leukemia so I thought oh it's all a big put on.
Jean: Breshnev.
Milly: Breshnev has leukemia. So I don't know what to think.
Repairs tend to occur in close proximity to the trouble source. One reason for this has to do with structural requirements: a system that required speakers to recall a trouble source from several turns before would be prone to immense organisational problems. Moreover, trouble sources which are not addressed close to their occurrence can quickly lead to significant problems in an exchange. Schegloff (cf. Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998) provides an example of a call to a talk radio show in which the host and caller fail to identify and deal with a misunderstanding about what each is referring to. Without realising, they both continue to talk about different event. The resulting confusion soon leads to disagreement which then escalates to hostility and by the end of the call both parties are practically shouting at each other.
In this sense, one important function of the repair system is the maintenance of mutual orientation to common topics and fields of reference. Work on repair system has shown that there is a 'preference' for self-repair over other-repair. The source of evidence comes from analysis of interaction during repair sequence.
II. OVERALL ORGANISATION OF CONVERSATIONS
Overall organization of conversations refers to the organization of the totality of the exchanges within some specific kind of conversation. One kind of conversation with a recognizable overall organization that has been much studied is the telephone call. They tend to have clear beginnings and carefully organized closing. Thus in telephone calls we may recognize the following typical components:
Opening section:
Summons - the telephone rings and the person at the receiving end almost invariable speaks first ('Hello')
Answer - the caller produces a greeting in response, usually with a self identification
Reason for summons
The main body of a call
It is usually structured by 'topical constraints': the content of the first slot is likely to be understood as the main reason for the call, and after that topics should by preference be 'fitted' to prior ones. Topics therefore are often withheld until a 'natural' location for their mention turns up. Evidence for this preference for linked transitions from one topic to another can be found in the common experience of having things to say that one never manages to get in. Unlinked topic 'jumps' are therefore usually marked by such signals as increased amplitude, raised pitch, hesitancy.
It has been suggested that topic can be characterized in terms of reference: A and B are talking about the same topic if they are talking about the same things or sets of referents. But co-referentiality is neither sufficient nor necessary to establish topical coherence. Rather, it is something constructed across turns by the collaboration of participants.
Closing section
Techniques for topic closing are intimately connected to the introduction of the closing section, or the shutting down of a conversation.
The general schema for closing sections:
a). a closing down of some topic which includes making arrangements (also called closing implicative topic
b) one or more pairs of passing turns with pre-closing items such as OK, All right, So
b) a final exchange of terminal elements (Farewells)
E.g. :
A: I'll ring you on Sunday night then
B: all right ring me Sunday
A: I will
B: bye bye then
A: bye
This structure avoids abrupt closure (construed as rudeness), and give option of re-opening after the pre-sequence, thus ensuring that neither participant is deprived of the right to add something forgotten.
We are now in the position to give a more technical characterization of what a conversation is. We must first distinguish the unit a conversation from conversational activity. The latter is something characterizable in terms of local organizations, and especially the operation of turn-taking system. There are many kinds of talk (sermons, lectures) that do not have these properties and which we would not want to consider conversational. There are many other kinds of talk (eg. classroom interrogation) which exhibit features of conversational activity like turn-taking, but which are clearly not conversations.
Conversation as a unit, on the other hand, is characterizable in terms of overall organization of the sort sketched here, in addition to the use of conversational activities like turn-taking.
III. SUMMARY
Repair is a generic term used in CA to cover a wide range of phenomena, from seeming errors in turn-taking, such as overlapping talk, to any of the forms of what is commonly called 'corrections' - that is, substantive faults in the contents of what someone has said.
Repair types
The repair system embodies a distinction between the initiation of repair (marking something as a source of trouble), and the actual repair itself. There is also a distinction between repair initiated by self (the speaker who produced the trouble source), and repair initiated by other. Consequently, there are four varieties of repair:
Self-initiated self-repair. Repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source.
Other-initiated self-repair. Repair is carried out by the speaker of the trouble source but initiated by the recipient.
Self-initiated other-repair. The speaker of a trouble source may try and get the recipient to repair the trouble - for example if a name is proving troublesome to remember.
Other-initiated other-repair. The recipient of a trouble-source turn both initiates and carries out the repair. This is closest to what is conventionally understood by 'correction'.
Work on repair system has shown that there is a 'preference' for self-repair over other-repair
Overall organization of conversations refers to the organization of the totality of the exchanges within some specific kind of conversation.
One kind of conversation with a recognizable overall organization that has been much studied is the telephone call.
Opening section:
Summons - the telephone rings and the person at the receiving end almost invariable speaks first ('Hello')
Answer - the caller produces a greeting in response, usually with a self identification
Reason for summons
The main body of a call
It is usually structured by 'topical constraints': the content of the first slot is likely to be understood as the main reason for the call, and after that topics should by preference be 'fitted' to prior ones. Topics therefore are often withheld until a 'natural' location for their mention turns up
Closing section
The general schema for closing sections:
a). a closing down of some topic which includes making arrangements (also called closing implicative topic)
b) one or more pairs of passing turns with pre-closing items such as OK, All right, So
c) a final exchange of terminal elements (Farewells)
Conversational activity is something characterizable in terms of local organizations, and especially the operation of turn-taking system.
IV. TASKS:
1. Identify types of repairs in the following extracts (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998):
N: She was givin' me a:ll the people that were gone
this year I mean this quarter y' /know
Y: / yeah
L: an' but all of the door 'n things were taped up=
=I mean y' know they put up y'know that
kinda paper stuff, the brown paper.
A: Lissana pigeons
(0.7)
B: Quail I think
A: Have you ever tried a clinic?
B: What?
A: Have you ever tried a clinic?
2. In the following conversation, identify repairs (Source: Coposescu:2002:206)
(NS1 stands for a native speaker of English who is interviewing a Romanian candidate -RC3 - for a post university course on social work)
NS1: ok, do you know what is supervision in social work?
RC3: supervision
NS1: supervision for you as a ∕ worker.
RC3: ∕ my
NS1: ∕ do you understand the concept?
RC3: supervise myself?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schegloff, E. A. & Sacks, H., 1973, Opening up
Closings, in Semiotica, 7: 289-327.
Schegloff,
E., A.,
preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation, in Language, vol 53, No. 2, 361-382
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