Choosing Not to Repair: Sorry as a Warrant for Interactional Progress

Abstract

Problems in conversation with those who suffer from aphasia often result in long sequences of repair, hindering progress. This article identifies an aphasic speaker's creative adaptation of a familiar linguistic resource to try and get around the problem. He uses the lexical apology sorry as a resource to close down collaborative word searching and to move the conversation forward. The analysis shows how he mobilizes the linguistic properties of the word to render it interpretable by the coparticipant in the interaction. We also see how his use of sorry to move the conversation on depends for its effect on epistemic authority—what both parties to the interaction know about the topic under discussion.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Rosalind Rogers for making the data and clinical information available and to the reviewers and editor of ROLSI for constructive feedback that greatly improved this article.

Notes

¹Note, the preference for self-repair is not accounted for solely by reference to the preference for “progressivity” since other-initiated self-repair is preferred over other-initiated other-repair, pointing to a clear preference for self-repair over other-repair at the expense of progressivity.

²A key question for Perkins (2003) is the impact of opting not to initiate repair on the aphasic speaker's overall contribution to conversation. Similar issues are discussed in the context of Alzheimer's discourse in Rhys (2001) but drawing on the notion of the management of “face” in the context of word-finding difficulties.

³The volunteer in this case is the parent of one of the speech therapy students involved in the intensive therapy course.

⁴It is not clear whether the lexical difficulty experienced by AS here involves a new hint or the original target word itself. It is, however, sequentially clearly a new word search embedded in the surrounding “hint and guess” sequence.

⁵Strictly speaking, the question is conceived as a question for participants who are always the primary analysts of the data for whom the talk is designed. However, if it is the generic issue for participants, it is also therefore the generic issue for analysts, and since the talk is designed to allow the recipient to address this question, it also possible for analysts to address it.

⁶In these contexts, the coparticipants engage in a different form of collaborative repair where the nonimpaired participant attempts to cue the target word for AS.

⁷ Coulmas (1981, fn. 5) makes it clear that he is not attempting to account for “corrupt” (sic) uses of apology terms in his analysis. He uses the properties of the object of regret to deal with polysemic interpretations of apologies but does not attempt to make it stretch to instances where the apology accomplishes a completely distinct conversational action.

⁸ Schegloff (1982) argues that continuers such as uh huh display an orientation to the possibility of repair as omnirelevant.

⁹In this sense, this use of an apology falls into Edmondson's (1981) category of disarming apologies where the apology prefaces or precedes the offending action. Coulmas (1981) refers to such anticipatory apologies as ex ante apologies triggered by a predictable offence.

¹⁰Note, it is the sequential location of the TCU following sorry that gives it its interpretation as an account. Elsewhere, as we have seen, the same phrase is oriented to as a Trouble Indicating Behavior.

¹¹This, of course, leaves open the question of evidence that the apology action is nonetheless accomplished. Sorry is certainly hearable as addressing the facework issues in closing down word searching. Moreover, the provision by AS of an account in Extract 2 also points to the relevance of the apology action.