Conversation across cultures

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103

This special issue reports on a cross-linguistic study of other-initiated repair, a domain at the crossroads of language, mind, and social life. Other-initiated repair is part of a system of practices that people use to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. The contributions in this special issue describe the linguistic resources and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair in ten different languages. Here we provide an overview of the research methods and the conceptual framework. The empirical base for the project consists of corpora of naturally occurring conversations, collected in fieldsites around the world. Methodologically, we combine qualitative analysis with a comparative-typological perspective, and we formulate principles for the cross-linguistic comparison of conversational structures. A key move, of broad relevance to pragmatic typology, is the recognition that formats for repair initiation form paradigm-like systems that are ultimately language-specific, and that comparison is best done at the level of the constitutive properties of these formats. These properties can be functional (concerning aspects of linguistic formatting) as well as sequential (concerning aspects of the interactional environment). We show how functional and sequential aspects of conversational structure can capture patterns of commonality and diversity in conversational structures within and across languages.

Section: A Comparative Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Towards a Typology Of Conversational Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Other-initiated repair across languages: towards a typology of conversational structures

Dingemanse¹,

Enfield²

2015

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103

“…Although the heavy reliance on the visual modality may be a Rossel Island specialization, non-verbal signals (often similar in kind) probably play a widespread role in OIR systems, as suggested in Dingemanse & Floyd 2014. As a reviewer points out, it might be interesting to see how the absence of the visual channel, e.g.…”

Section: In the Eyes Of The Beholder -A Rossel Island Specializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Other-initiated repair in Yélî Dnye: Seeing eye-to-eye in the language of Rossel Island

Levinson

2015

Other-initiated repair (OIR) is the fundamental back-up system that ensures the effectiveness of human communication in its primordial niche, conversation. This article describes the interactional and linguistic patterns involved in other-initiated repair in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea. The structure of the article is based on the conceptual set of distinctions described in Chapters 1 and 2 of the special issue, and describes the major properties of the Rossel Island system, and the ways in which OIR in this language both conforms to familiar European patterns and deviates from those patterns. Rossel Island specialities include lack of a Wh-word open class repair initiator, and a heavy reliance on visual signals that makes it possible both to initiate repair and confirm it non-verbally. But the overall system conforms to universal expectations.

“…The Chachi maintained their language and migrated from the Andes to the relative isolation of the coastal lowlands where they live today (Jijón y Caamaño 1914, DeBoer 1995, Floyd 2010, with a current population of about 10,000 speakers (INEC 2010;Lewis et al 2013). Aside from some recent work by the author, there has been no previous work examining interactive practices of speakers of Cha'palaa (Floyd 2010, Floyd and Bruil 2011, Dingemanse and Floyd 2014, and until recently there had been only minimal work on the grammar (Moore 1962, Wiebe 1977, Vitadello 1988Floyd 2009Floyd , 2010.…”

Section: The Cha'palaa Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Repair practices are a good choice for this kind of 'pragmatic typology' Dingemanse and Floyd 2014) because speakers of any language will have to deal with problems of producing and perceiving or understanding in one way or another, and we can observe similar types of repair sequences across different languages. Here the focus is on a specific type of repair sequence called other-initiated repair (OIR), in which one speaker signals a problem with a previous speaker's turn, for example by saying "what?…”

Section: The Cha'palaa Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Other-initiated repair in Cha’palaa

Floyd

2015

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This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha'palaa (a Barbacoan language spoken in north-western Ecuador). Special attention is given to the relation of repair formats to the morphosyntactic and intonational systems of the language. It examines the distinctive falling intonation observed with interjections and content question formats and the pattern of a held mid-high tone observed in polarity questions, as well as the function of Cha'palaa grammatical features such as the case marking system, the nominal classifiers and the verb classification system as formats for repair initiation. It considers a selection of examples from a video corpus to illustrate a broad range of sequence types of opened and restricted other-initiated repair, noting that Cha'palaa had the highest relative rate of open repair in the cross-linguistic sample. It also considers the extension of OIR to other practices such as news uptake and disagreement in the Cha'palaa corpus.