Other-initiated repair in Murrinh-Patha

• Authors: Joe Blythe
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The range of linguistic structures and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair (OIR) is surveyed for the Northern Australian language Murrinh-Patha. By drawing on a video corpus of informal Murrinh- Patha conversation, the OIR formats are compared in terms of their utility and versatility. Certain “restricted” formats have semantic properties that point to prior trouble source items. While these make the restricted repair initiators more specialised, the “open” formats are less well resourced semantically, which makes them more versatile. They tend to be used when the prior talk is potentially problematic in more ways than one. The open formats (especially thangku, “what?”) tend to solicit repair operations on each potential source of trouble, such that the resultant repair solution improves upon the troublesource turn in several ways.

Keywords

EN

other-initiated repair; conversation analysis; semantics

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1

Dates

accepted

2014-02-04

received

2014-10-13

online

2015-04-29

Contributors

author

Joe Blythe

• University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opli-2015-0003