Reviews
Nemeth's book contributes to cross-linguistic research on same-turn self-repair and allows insights into the use of four repair operations in Hungarian everyday interactions.Journal of Pragmatics
A Preference Hierarchy Model of Same-Turn Repair Operations in Talk-in-Interaction
Zsuzsanna Németh [+–]
MTA-DE-SZTE Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics, University of Szeged, Hungary
Zsuzsanna Németh received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical linguistics at the University of Szeged in 2016. She currently works in the Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on same-turn self-repair strategies. She aims to explore the interactional functions and other characteristics of repair operations, their appearance in Hungarian, as well as the relationship between them. Her peer-reviewed papers have appeared in several journals and collections of papers, among others, in Journal of Pragmatics and Mouton Series in Pragmatics. She has been teaching various courses in conversation analysis, pragmatics, statistics, and language description at the University of Szeged. She is a member of the Hungarian Research Centre for Pragmatics, established in 2012.
This book studies four self-initiated same-turn repair strategies in talk-in-interaction relative to each other, namely, recycling, replacement, insertion, and aborting. Based on a thorough analysis of a Hungarian corpus, as well as the previous results on another nine languages, a preference hierarchy model of repair operations is proposed that is able to interpret same-turn repair operations relative to each other. It reinterprets the relationship between the principle of intersubjectivity and the principle of progressivity in talk-in-interaction. Saying that the principle of maintaining progressivity also has an impact on the principle of maintaining intersubjectivity (not only vice versa), it supposes a two-way relationship between intersubjectivity and progressivity. It is found that the speakers’ possible choices of repair operations relating to self-repair depend on at least three factors: the function of repair operations, the number of respects in which they override the preference for progressivity, and the morphosyntactic structure of the language used. This also highlights the interaction between grammar and pragmatics. Although the object theoretical background of the book is conversation analysis, the author attempts to show how the methodological apparatus of conversation analysis can be supplied by other methods in order to enhance the reliability of her results.
Series: Pragmatic Interfaces
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Introduction [+–] 1-9
The aim of this book is to find an answer to the question whether it is possible to interpret same-turn repair operations relative to each other. After a comparative analysis of four repair operations, namely, recycling, replacement, insertion, and aborting, a preference hierarchy model for same-turn repair operations is proposed.
Chapter 2
The p-model as a metatheoretical model of linguistic argumentation and data handling elaborated by Kertész and Rákosi helps me to reflect consciously and metatheoretically on various subphases of my research. Illuminating these metatheoretical issues during my object theoretical discussion, I aim to make my object theoretical results more reliable.
Chapter 3
Since the motivation of the research presented in this book is rooted in the interactional aspects of language use, I chose conversation analysis as the object theoretical framework for my investigation. In Chapter 3, the conversation analytic approach to the phenomenon of talk-in-interaction and repair is introduced.
Chapter 4
The Corpus and Methodology of the Study [+–] 26-31
The qualitative, case-by-case analysis of repair phenomena in a corpus consisting of Hungarian everyday conversations is supplied by quantitative and statistical methods. The results of this investigation, the results of previous literature, as well as my intuition lead to the proposal of a preference hierarchy model of same-turn repair operations.
Chapter 5
Four Repair Operations [+–] 32-62
In order to find a possible basis for the comparative examination of repair operations, I have selected four different repair operations to examine: replacement, recycling, insertion, and aborting. In Chapter 5, using examples both from the Hungarian corpus and the previous studies on other languages, I introduce these four operations.
Chapter 6
Recycling and Replacement [+–] 63-98
In Chapter 6, in the light of cross-linguistic examinations concerning recycling and replacement in the previous literature, I analyse my Hungarian corpus and set up a preference hierarchy among recycling initiated after recognizable completion, recycling initiated before recognizable completion, and replacement. I find that speakers tend to avoid replacement cross-linguistically.
Chapter 7
The preference hierarchy model of replacement and the two types of recycling is developed into another one which is able to describe any repair operations relative to each other. The basis of this model is one of the inherent properties of repair, namely, that it overrides the preference for progressivity.
Chapter 8
Conclusion and Future Directions [+–] 122-124
Since this new model is able to analyse and interpret repair operations relative to each other, it serves as an answer to the main question of this book. Reinterpreting the relationship between the principle of intersubjectivity and progressivity, it imposes new questions on all the phenomena suspending progressivity in talk-in-interaction.
Journal of Pragmatics
