Other-initiated repair in Siwu

Abstract

This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana. Other-initiated repair is the set of techniques used by people to deal with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Formats for repair initiation in Siwu exploit language-specific resources like question words and noun class morphology. At the same time, the basic structure of the system bears a strong similarity to other-initiated repair in other languages. Practices described for Siwu thus are potentially of broader relevance to the study of other-initiated repair. This article documents how different prosodic realisations of repair initiators may index social actions and features of the speech event; how two distinct roles of repetition in repair initiators are kept apart by features of turn design; and what kinds of items can be treated as 'dispensable' in resayings. By charting how other-initiated repair uses local linguistic resources and yet is shaped by interactional needs that transcend particular languages, this study contributes to the growing field of pragmatic typology: the study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them. Every language has to provide its speakers with ways to deal with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding: repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). The focus of this paper is on other-initiated repair: repair sequences jointly produced by participants in interaction. Though there is a considerable literature on repair in general and on other-initiated repair specifically (for recent overviews, see Hayashi, Raymond, and Sidnell 2013; Kitzinger 2013), much research so far has focused on English or other major languages (but see Moerman 1977; Schegloff 1987; Dingemanse, Blythe, and Dirksmeyer 2014; and for the West-African area, the work by Obeng 1992; 1999 on Akan). This paper describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in Eastern Ghana.Answering to universal interactional needs, yet implemented with local linguistic resources, otherinitiated repair is an excellent domain for crosslinguistic investigation. In the Siwu corpus, other-initiation of repair occurs on average about once every minute, underlining its crucial role in the real-time negotiation of mutual understanding. Without repair and other forms of grounding (Clark and Brennan 1991), our conversations would be constantly derailed and our joint efforts would be thwarted. As we see below and elsewhere in this special issue, other-initiated repair provides a well-defined and stable context for comparison within and across languages. This makes it possible to draw up inventories of formats for otherinitiation of repair, and to compare these formats as items in a system, or options in a paradigm (Halliday 1971).Language is used first and foremost in everyday social interaction. The conversational structures associated with th...

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