The Communicative Role of Self-repetition in a Specialised Corpus of Business Discourse

Abstract

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of fluent speech. The present corpus study examines naturally-occurring business discourse between native speakers and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong. By examining the form and communicative functions of instances of self-repetition, this study aims to suggest a framework for future studies of self-repetition, as well as to raise language learners' awareness of language use in intercultural communication business contexts.

Keywords:

• business discourse
• Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE)
• intercultural communication
• language awareness
• self-repetition