Other-initiated repair is an essential interactional practice to secure mutual understanding in everyday interaction. This article presents evidence from a large conversational corpus of a sign language, showing that signers of Argentine Sign Language (Lengua de Señas Argentina or 'LSA'), like users of spoken languages, use a systematic set of linguistic formats and practices to indicate troubles of signing, seeing and understanding. The general aim of this article is to provide a general overview of the different visual-gestural linguistic patterns of other-initiated repair sequences in LSA. It also describes the quantitative distribution of other-initiated repair formats based on a collection of 213 cases. It describes the multimodal components of open and restricted types of repair initiators, and reports a previously undescribed implicit practice to initiate repair in LSA in comparison to explicitly produced formats. Part of a special issue presenting repair systems across a range of languages, this article contributes to a better understanding of the phenomenon of other-initiated repair in terms of visual and gestural practices in human interaction in both signed and spoken languages.
Keywords: other-initiated repair; conversation analysis; sign languageThe other-initiated repair system acts as the main guarantee of intersubjective understanding (Schegloff, 1992;Schegloff et al., 1977) playing a crucial role in any kind of human interaction, regardless of the semiotic system employed (Enfield, 2009a). The phenomenon of repair has been traditionally defined based on spoken language in terms of problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding, which can be initiated and carried out by either a speaker or hearer (Schegloff et al., 1977). Whether there is a conventionalized set of linguistic resources to indicate perceptual and understanding problems in a sign language based on naturally occurring data has been an open question.On the other hand, research has progressed enormously in recent decades in the description, and analysis of sign language, including grammar, semantics, psycholinguistics, and typology, nevertheless there are still some research areas that are uncharted territory. One of these areas is the study of situated informal social interaction. Research in this area is now moving towards a broader cross-linguistic database and video-based methods of analysis. However, the main focus is still on spoken language, and sign language remains largely unexplored.This article presents evidence from a large conversational videotaped corpus recorded in deaf associations and clubs in Buenos Aires, Argentina, showing that signers of Argentine Sign Language (Lengua de Señas Argentina or 'LSA') also use a variable and systematic set of linguistic formats and practices to indicate troubles of signing, seeing and understanding rather than speaking and hearing. The definition of the phenomenon of repair, one of the core mechanisms of linguistic interaction, has been expanded here to include the visual a...