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Just as turn-taking has been found to be both context-free and context-sensitive (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974), the organization of repair is also shown here to be both context-free and context-sensitive. In a comparison of American and German conversation, repair can be shown to be context-free in that, basically, the same mechanism can be found across these two languages. However, repair is also sensitive to the linguistic inventory of a given language; in German, morphological marking, syntactic constraints, and grammatical congruity across turns are used as interactional resources. In addition, repair is sensitive to certain characteristics of social situations. The selection of a particular repair initiator, Germanbitte?‘pardon?’, indexes that there is no mutual gaze between interlocutors; i.e., there is no common course of action. The selection ofbitte?not only initiates repair; it also spurs establishment of mutual gaze, and thus displays that there is attention to a common focus. (Conversation analysis, context, cross-linguistic analysis, repair, gaze, telephone conversation, co-present interaction, grammar and interaction)

In continuation of recent discussions in JoP and elsewhere concerning the aptness of conversation analysis (''CA'') as a research methodology for ''intercultural'' interaction, this CA-study shows some procedures by which interactants overtly or covertly orient to regional or linguistic category membership where apparent trouble in hearing or understanding the talk are addressed (''otherinitiated repair'' [Language 54 (2) (1977) 361]). These practices of membership categorizing are inferred from different kinds of structural elaborateness beyond the basic two-part repair sequence. CA is shown to provide analytic tools which are highly suitable to detecting and describing practices of membership categorizing along regional or linguistic lines both in so-called ''native/native'' and ''native/nonnative'' interaction.

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