Asking the Obvious: Other-Repeats as Requests for Reconfirmation

Abstract

Abstract Co-participants may reproduce (part of) a prior speaker’s turn to various interactional ends. The focus here is on a specific subclass of sequence-initiating other-repeats, namely second sayings asking the original speaker to reconfirm what they just said. Such reconfirmation-seeking other-repeats have hardly been studied in their own right but typically either been treated in studies on repair initiations or ‘newsmarks’. In approaching these ostensibly different types of reconfirmation-seeking other-repeats collectively, this interactional-linguistic study reveals that the distinction between problem-indicating – and thus, in a broad sense, repair-implicated – and newsmarking other-repeats is gradual rather than binary. Drawing on video recordings of informal German and English face-to-face conversations as data, it further shows that co-occurring multimodal marking may contribute to enhancing action recognisability and displaying (dis)affiliation and that the study’s findings may be relevant across languages.

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