Oloff2018

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Oloff2018
BibType ARTICLE
Key Oloff2018
Author(s) Florence Oloff
Title “Sorry?”/“Como?”/“Was?” – Open class and embodied repair initiators in international workplace interactions
Editor(s)
Tag(s) Conversation analysis, EMCA, Embodied other-initiation of repair, International work settings, Open class repair initiators, Repair sequences, Video data
Publisher
Year 2018
Language English
City
Month mar
Journal Journal of Pragmatics
Volume 126
Number
Pages 29–51
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.11.002
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.

Notes