Handling sequentially inapposite responses

Abstract

As a critical interactional resource to establish or re-establish shared understanding in talk-in-interaction, participants deploy various practices of repair organization. Repair can address any sort of problem in speaking, hearing and understanding, anywhere in the interaction, in any type of activity (Schegloff 1992b; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). It is precisely the availability of a robust mechanism for dealing with trouble in interaction that permits oral non-scripted language use to be as ambiguous, indirect, allusive, elliptic, incoherent and otherwise ‘fundamentally flawed’ (Coupland, Wiemann and Giles 1991) as it is and yet enable participants to manage their language-mediated activities largely successfully (House, Kasper and Ross 2003; Schegloff 1991). Following Schegloff and colleagues’ (1977) seminal paper, a large volume of research attests to the ubiquity of repair in talk among linguistically expert speakers. Second language researchers working in the tradition of conversation analysis (CA) have been particularly interested in examining the formats and functions of repair in talk including second or foreign language speakers. The impetus for this focus comes first and foremost from the empirically sustained assumption that when shared linguistic resources are limited, mutual understanding may be at an increased risk, requiring more repair work from participants in order to manage their joint activities.