Organization of repair in Chinese conversation

Abstract

This study examines the organization of repair in Chinese conversation. First, six major patterns are established which characterize how the repair source is redone, i.e., whether it is a morpheme, a word, a phrase, or a clause being recast, and whether it repeats, replaces, adds to, or abandons the original construction. Then, to investigate the potential constraint on organizing this kind of speech, the repair pattern, the syntax of the repaired segment, and the extent of recycling are analyzed. Although repair is accomplished within the syntactic environment, the findings suggest that the way in which it is done is conditioned by neither syntax nor the repair pattern. Rather, the extent of recycling is subject to quantity and lexical-form complexity. On the one hand, a repair tends to recycle only the word immediately prior to the repair source, despite its category; on the other hand, the recycling tends to be blocked if the preceding word is in complex NP form. Both constraints are significant for the speaker attempting to resume the conversation as soon as possible and to keep it going. Moreover, they also reflect the speech preference of Chinese speakers, thus indicating a facet of conversational Chinese

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