Repairing Indexical Formulations: An Experiment in Big Team CA Research
| Number: | P68 |
| Organizer: | Kitzinger, Celia |
| Co-Organizer: | |
| Abstract: | |
| This panel describes the rationale, organization and preliminary results of a large international team of scholars working together on indexical formulation repair in talk-in-interaction. We have more than 300 instances in which speakers first use indexical forms to refer to persons (e.g., he, she, they), places (e.g., here, there) or to objects, activities and other entities (e.g. it, this, that), and subsequently initiate repair, replacing the indexical with a full-form reference (e.g. He’s ↑ni:ce isn’e.=John.). As in the case shown, around three-quarters of the collection are transition-space repairs in which the trouble source is not TCU-final. There will be at least eight presentations, the first of which will constitute an introduction to the project (by Celia Kitzinger & Gene Lerner, the project co-organizers). This will explain how it has been organised with ten researchers internationally working in at least three languages with a large and varied corpus, including the practical requirements of working collaboratively and sharing data electronically. The remaining seven (or so) presentations will be presented by other team members and will report some of the key findings emerging from the project: the relationship between repair and so-called ‘right dislocation’ (in English, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian); the contribution made by indexical repair to an understanding of person reference; the interactional effects of treating indexicals as repairable - other than managing ambiguity of reference; repairing indexicals in reported speech; how the description of indexical repair practices led to the discovery of a parallel repair practice for disambiguating the indefinite collective person reference, “people”; and description of an alternative to indexical repair - the practice of embedded disambiguation. |
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