Dingemanse2015a

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Dingemanse2015a
BibType ARTICLE
Key Dingemanse2015a
Author(s) Mark Dingemanse
Title Other-initiated repair in Siwu
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Siwu, Typology, Other-initiated repair, Repair
Publisher
Year 2015
Language English
City
Month
Journal Open Linguistics
Volume 1
Number 1
Pages 232–255
URL Link
DOI 10.1515/opli-2015-0001
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana. Other-initiated repair is the set of techniques used by people to deal with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Formats for repair initiation in Siwu exploit language-specific resources like question words and noun class morphology. At the same time, the basic structure of the system bears a strong similarity to other-initiated repair in other languages. Practices described for Siwu thus are potentially of broader relevance to the study of other-initiated repair. This article documents how different prosodic realisations of repair initiators may index social actions and features of the speech event; how two distinct roles of repetition in repair initiators are kept apart by features of turn design; and what kinds of items can be treated as ‘dispensable’ in resayings. By charting how other-initiated repair uses local linguistic resources and yet is shaped by interactional needs that transcend particular languages, this study contributes to the growing field of pragmatic typology: the study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them.

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