Repairing what's reported
| Panel: | P86 - New Directions in Research on Repair |
| Author: | Clift, Rebecca |
| Abstract: | |
| In this paper, I investigate a phenomenon particularly vulnerable to repair: reported speech. In a corpus of naturally-occurring phone call interactions in English, I examine a number of examples in which an instance of direct reported speech is halted either just before or after the beginning of its launch in order to insert other material before the halted turn is resumed, as in the extract below: H-X(C):1:1:1 Les→ .hh An' Carol said her: flat (.) She lives in a ground floor flat. .hh with a little ga:rd'n at the back and uh .hh i (.) it's → absolutely spotless she said an:' a:ll her Christmas preparations are done, all [her cooki:ng? Mum [↑Oh:. (0.3) Mum How marvellous. In a number of such cases, we see what warrants disruption to the progressivity of a turn, and why; how the motivation for abandoning a turn is displayed in what follows it. Such repairs bring into sharp focus shifts in what Schegloff (2000) has termed ‘granularity’ in the means by which experience is formulated. In these cases, a turn initiating a fine-grained detailing of what was claimedly said is aborted in order to pursue, in the first instance, a coarser-grained characterization. These characterizations may be embodied in anything from phrases to longer sequences of interaction. We thus see, in such parenthetical inserts, participants’ ‘online’ judgements of interactional priority, how they are realised, and what forms they take. In doing so, we have access to the range of factors shaping the design of talk, such as speakers’ footing, their orientations to co-participants’ knowledge and stance, and their orientations to the trajectories of action in which their formulations are embedded. |
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