An Adjunct to Repair: You Know in Speech Production and Understanding Difficulties

ABSTRACT

The English-language particle you know is frequently associated with speech production and understanding difficulties. The present study combines sequential and distributional analyses to explicate the particle’s relationship to the conversational repair system. It demonstrates that you know functions as an adjunct to repair, addressing secondary difficulties associated with implementing self-repair in practice, while also promoting the avoidance of transformative repair operations. This repair adjunct viewpoint trades off the particle’s general import as an alignment token and is supported by examining its specialized role in: (a) self-repair operations, (b) suboptimal formulations, and (c) understanding pursuits. This article elaborates our understanding of the repair system by identifying an ancillary practice that smooths over recurrent shortcomings of natural speech. Data in American English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Data were gathered with informed consent, and as necessary, identities have been anonymized.

² Some shorter encounters yielded less than 10 cases.

³ For the few replacement repairs in our sample, the alignment token appears tied not to the replacement operation per se but rather its suboptimal outcome. We explore this in the next section (see Excerpt 16).

⁴ Abandoned self-repair is one aspect of a more general phenomenon, the association of you know with formulations left incomplete, which we examine later in this article.

⁵ This formulation is also lexically nonspecific (“things”), incorporating the next form of suboptimality to be examined.

⁶ A related set of cases, also sequentially disjunctive but beyond the scope of this article, involve new topic initiations. These are known to be subject to both self- and other-initiated repair (Schegloff, 1979, pp. 270–272) while also attracting you know (see also Schourup, 1985, pp. 107–110). Such cases reveal another convergence between sequential disjunctiveness, repair vulnerability, and alignment tokens.