Collecting ‘repeated-reparandum repairs’: Semester 2 and summer 2016/2017

The aim of this project is to lay the foundation for an interactional linguistic investigation of an interesting kind of self-correction: namely, one in which the speaker repeats the problematic word or phrase they have just uttered (the ‘reparandum’), before going ahead with the correction (the ‘repair’). An example is given in (1), in which hours is produced twice before its correction to minutes.

(1)       they have to run for forty hours (.) hours? minutes

Such instances of ‘repeated-reparandum repairs’ have received little attention in the growing literature on self-repair, but they deserve it because they are rather abnormal. Generally, speakers design self-corrections to draw as little attention to their error or infelicity as possible, and to get the correction behind them as quickly as possible. In these ‘repeated-reparandum’ cases, by contrast, speakers appear to make a point of highlighting what they have gotten wrong.

The obvious question is why speakers choose this repair format when they do. An example like (1) might suggest that the speaker knows that hours is wrong but can’t immediately think of the word to replace it with – so buys some time by repeating hours. But this explanation doesn’t fit well with what we know about speech planning in self-correction. Might there be interactional reasons for drawing attention to what’s gone wrong in formulating the utterance? A crucial first step in addressing this question is to gather as many recorded instances of this type of correction as possible, and group them according to their overall shapes. It is clear that this type of repair can be implemented in various ways, from simple three-word sequences such as that in (1) to more complex constructions such as that in (2), where Joy cuts off her first mention of dinner jacket and accompanies the repetition with laughter and oh god; moreover, Eileen joins in with the laughter, making this self-correction a joint activity.

(2)          Joy:            Keith’s got a: a:: a nice:

uh:m (1.0) you know dinner j- oh god

((starts laughing)) dinner [jacket?

Eileen:                                              [((laughs))

Joy:            sports jack[et you know

Eileen:                       [sports jacket.

Relevant fields of linguistics

• Interactional linguistics
• Pragmatics

This project is ideal for students who have completed, or are thinking of taking, the module  Interactional Linguistics.

Start date: any time during the remainder of Semester 2, 2016-17, or later during the summer

End date: 6 weeks later    

Hours per week: 3

           

Activities to be undertaken by RES student:

• Read through transcriptions of spontaneous conversation contained in publicly available corpora, and/or listen through conversational data collected by students on the module Interactional Linguistics to spot instances of this type of self-correction.
• Where necessary, transcribe the instance applying appropriate transcription conventions.
• Analyse the structure and context of each identified instance so that similar instances can be grouped together for future analysis.
• Create a simple database of instances using Word and Excel.

Number of possible students: 3

Likely outcomes:

• Expertise in reading, writing and interpreting conversation-analytic transcripts.
• Expertise in the interactional-linguistic analysis of a particular phenomenon.
• Expertise in the use of Word and Excel for creating simple databases for linguistic analysis.
• Insight into the data collection phase of the research process

Students who have questions about this project should contact Dr Leendert Plug on [email protected]

If you would like to work on this project, please complete an RES application form and send it to Leendert Plug by May 8th 2017. If your application is successful, the supervisor will be in touch in due course.