Repair organization is a system of practices for dealing with problems of hearing, speaking, and understanding and a central mechanism for maintaining intersubjectivity in conversation. Among the different types of repair, other-initiated other-repair—that is, repair initiated and resolved by a recipient of a trouble source—is the least understood. In other-initiated other-repair sequences, an interactant self-selects to enact “other-correction” of some problematic aspect of another’s talk. What occasions other-correction? How are such corrections carried out? What is accomplished by correcting others? To answer these questions, I draw on a large dataset of ordinary conversational materials in the English and Russian languages and explore “practices and actions” of other-correction. I show how the activity of correcting others is shaped by participants’ orientations to positionality, intersubjectivity, and normativity. Data are in American/British English and Russian.
Acknowledgment
This article is based on a plenary address delivered at the International Conference for Conversation Analysis in Brisbane, Australia on July 1, 2023. I thank all conference attendees and Rutgers University CA Lab members for their feedback on the presentation, and Jeffrey Robinson and three anonymous referees for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1
In the transcripts, | marks onset of visible conduct; names in lower-case letters indicate who enacts the noted visible actions.
2 Schegloff et al. (Citation1977) discussed this sequential environment—following other-initiation of repair—as a relatively more common context for other-correction (Section 6.2, pp. 378–379). However, it is important not to conflate these two sequential positions (initiating vs. responding).
3 Visible (nonvocal) embodied actions may also be subject to correction, but they lie outside the scope of this article.
4 I would like to thank Jenny Mandelbaum and Jeffrey Robinson for sharing their data and Jeffrey Robinson and Aleksandr Shirokov for help in identifying cases.
8 is a simplified representation that omits infrequent forms (e.g., You mean Y) and prosodic details, such as the use of falling vs. (infrequent) rising intonation.
9 This ordering may allow the trouble-source speaker to launch self-correction at a possible completion of the rejection segment (although I only have two instances of this happening).
10 The Russian word for “handwriting” (podcherk) is morphologically quite removed from the words “writing” (pisat’) and “hand” (ruka), so its meaning would not be obvious to somebody who does not already know the word.
11 This segment generated a lot of audience criticism of Prue for her “harsh” correction. Note that the correction targets a word form (cactuses) often considered to be “accurate.” Additionally, the correction is unusually quick, following only a micropause in line 6 (although this may be a product of editorial cuts).
12 The research assistant, who set the camera up and who can delete (parts of) the recording, is participating in the interaction. Ostensibly addressed to some future audience (rather than to the co-present research assistant), “Can you delete that?” is thus neither designed nor treated as a serious request.
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