Sidestepping grammar

Abstract

The notion of colligation (Jefferson 1988) refers to ways in which participants focus on a troublesource (or troublesources) of another speaker in the talk without explicitly ‘doing correcting’. Interactants may be seen to be ‘tying together a wrong item and the item which puts it right, such that the wrong item is added to by the right item, rather than discarded and replaced’ (Jefferson 1988: 6). This notion finds resonance in the work on exposed and embedded correction (Jefferson 1987). In this regard, Jefferson (1987) observes that recipients of other-correction sometimes accept or incorporate a correction into their own utterance or turn at talk, and at other times reject it.