Other-initiated repair in Cha’palaa

Abstract

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.

Cognitive and Interactive Mechanisms for Mutual Understanding in Conversation

“…Given the importance of repair in resolving problems in communication, it was supposed that such a mechanism should exist -in some form -crosslinguistically (Schegloff, 1987). Dingemanse and colleagues' (2015) comparative meta-study indeed demonstrates that OIR is used across languages as disparate as Cha'palaa in Ecuador (Floyd, 2015), Lao (Enfield, 2015), Yélî Dnye (Levinson, 2015), and Malay (Mohd Jan & Saad, 2018)) in Asia, Icelandic (Gisladottir, 2015) and Italian (Rossi, 2015) in Europe, Siwu (Dingemanse, 2015) in Africa, and Murrinh-Patha (Blythe, 2015) in Northern Australia. Moreover, OIR follows similar patterns of use in non-verbal modalities, including Argentine Sign Language (Manrique, 2016) American Sign Language (Dively, 1998;Most, 2003), Norwegian Sign Language (Skedsmo, 2020), Tactile Australian Sign Language (Willoughby et al, 2014), Swiss German Sign Language (Girard-Groeber, 2020), and Chinantec whistled speech (Sicoli, 2016).…”