Das Heißt (“That Means”) for Formulations and Du Meinst (“You Mean”) for Repair? Interpretations of Prior Speakers’ Turns in German

ABSTRACT

The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.

Notes

¹ “Der Verstehensversuch ist eine Interpretation des problematischen Turns und enthält oft eine Reformulierung von dem, was der vorherige Turn (oder Teil des Turns) bedeuten könnte.” (“The attempt of claiming understanding is an interpretation of the problematic turn and often contains a reformulation of what the prior turn (or part of the turn) could mean.”) (Egbert, 2009, p. 101).

² PECII comprises recordings in Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Polish of board games, joint meals, and car drives.

³ We categorized response tokens into type-conforming versus non-type-conforming orienting to Raymond (2003). Stivers (2011) differentiates response types, too, calling the non-type-conforming responses “marked interjections” (Stivers, 2011, p. 85).

⁴ In this example, the repair differs from the repair in Example 2: Example 2 illustrates a correction, whereas Example 3 illustrates a candidate understanding. The different types of repair, however, are not the topic of our present analysis.

⁵ Benjamin (2012) shows that in case of English you mean the trouble source usually doesn’t lie in the adjacent TCU it is further away. Benjamin counts cases as further away, in which you mean follows the trouble source after a gap or an abandoned initial response. Our focus, however, is on identifying the trouble source in the environment before a speaker change. That is, even if a speaker reacts with du meinst only after a gap, we’d count the trouble source as adjacent if it is located in the last TCU said by the prior speaker.

⁶ As already stated in the second section, we did not systematically analyze differences between the yes/no declaratives du meinst/das heißt and the yes/no interrogatives meinst du and heißt das.

⁷ Expressing her interpretation in this way may be a strategy that is especially appropriate in interviews to prompt the interview partner to talk about or expand on a certain topic (see Clayman, 1992).

⁸ This is also supported by the fact that only 31.7% of interpretations with a das heißt + clause receive a minimal response, whereas this is the case for 57.1% of interpretations with a du meinst + phrase.