Repair

“The domain of repair was first defined by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977) as the set of practices whereby a co-interactant interrupts the ongoing course of action to attend to possible trouble in speaking, hearing or understanding the talk. ‘Trouble’ includes such things as ‘misarticulations, malapropisms, use of a “wrong” word, unavailability of a word when needed, failure to hear or to be heard, trouble on the part of the recipient in understadning, incorrect understandings by recipients’ (Schegloff, 1987: 2910), among others. Repair is used to ensure ‘that the interaction does not freeze in its place when trouble arises, that intersubjectovity is maintained or restored, and that the turn and sequence and activity can progress to possible completion’ (Schegloff, 2007b: xiv)”. (Kitzinger, 2013: 229)

“When a participant in conversation has difficulty understanding something another has said, or a difficulty hearing what was said, or figures that what the other said might in various ways be wrong, inaccurate or perhaps inapposite, then he or she may - but need not (see e.g., Jefferson, 1988) - take steps to rectify that difficulty by initiating its repair.” (Drew, 1997: 69-70)

References

Drew, P. (1997).Open' class repair initiators in response to sequential sources of trouble in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 69-10.

Kitzinger, C. (2013) Repair. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.) The handbook of conversation analysis. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Schegloff, E.A. (1987) Analyzing single episodes of interaction: An exercise in conversation analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50(2), 101-114.

Schegloff, E.A. (2007) Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G. & Sacks, H. (1977) The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53(2), 361-382.