Katko vai eiku? Itsekorjauksen aloitustavat ja vuorovaikutustehtävät

• Marja-Leena Sorjonen
• Minna Laakso

Avainsanat: itsekorjaukset, keskustelunanalyysi, partikkelit, puheen syntaksi

Abstrakti

Cut-off, the particle eiku and other practices for initiating self-repair, and the interactional functions of self-repair (englanti)

2/2005 (109)

Cut-off, the particle eiku and other practices for initiating self-repair, and the interactional functions of self-repair

The article examines both non-lexical and lexical means of initiating self-repair in an ongoing turn-constructional unit in Finnish conversation. In addition, interactional functions of self-repair are analysed. The data for the study come from a wide variety of interactions (100 telephone calls and 80 videotaped service encounters of different types), comprising some 600 instances of self-repair.

In the data examined, speakers use both non-lexical (e.g. cut-off) and lexical devices (particles) for marking the initiation of self-repair. The initiators dealt with here are cut-off, the particles eiku, tai and siis, and their combinations. Eiku combines the negation word (ei) and the conjunction ku(n), which has causal, contrastive and temporal meanings (as, while, when) in its other usages. It has become lexicalised as a particle for initiating repair in Finnish, and the writers report that they have not encountered similar devices in the literature on other languages. Outside of repair contexts, tai is used as a conjunction with the meaning or, and the particle siis is deployed as a marker of inference (so, then, therefore, etc.).

The analysis shows that these different initiators are not in free variation. Instead, the selection of the repair initiator allows the speaker to indicate the type of repair he/she has initiated, as set out below.

* The particle eiku indicates that the speaker is about to replace something he/she has just said. Alternatively, the speaker may abandon the line of speech and the syntactic construction altogether. These functions of eiku arise from the meaning of the negation word contained in the particle.

* The particle tai also indicates that the speaker is about to replace something he/she has just said. However, the element replaced may still be included as an alternative to the new element. This function of tai is associated with its use as a conjunction (or).

* The particle siis typically indicates that the repair is made in order to specify or explain something the speaker has just said.

* Cut-off was the most frequent self-repair initiator in the study data. It is the most general of the different ways of initiating self-repair as it does not indicate any specific type of repair process.

The ways in which self-repair is used to modify an ongoing utterance are very similar from one language to the next (e.g. replacing an element in the prior utterance by another or adding an element to what has just been said). By contrast, the practices for marking the initiation of self-repair can differ from one language to another, although no in-depth study of these practices has so far been made. The availability of both non-lexical and lexical devices for initiating self-repair in Finnish stands in contrast to, for example, English, in which self-repair is typically initiated non-lexically by a cut-off. In English, lexical devices, such as I mean, are used merely for abandoning the ongoing turn-constructional unit and syntactic construction. In Finnish, by contrast, lexical means can also be used for initiating a repair on a smaller unit such as a single word.

The writers also show that there exists a continuum of interactional functions of self-repair. At one end of this continuum lie immediate replacements of slips of the tongue, and at the other end lie cases in which the speaker is using self-repair to make the utterance more appropriate for the current recipient. In the middle there is self-repair designed to further specify what is being said in order to prevent possible misunderstandings (e.g. a doctor expanding on the advice he/she is giving to a patient). Self-repair is an interactional resource that is usable at any point in all kinds of speech event, from a formal service encounter to an everyday chat with a friend. The study data indicate that self-repair is frequent in, for example, turns which constitute key actions by professionals in institutional interaction (e.g. a doctors instructions or the advice given by a social security official). Self-repair also abounds in affective phases of interaction and in verbal actions used for unravelling delicate issues and for resolving disagreements.

Marja-Leena Sorjonen & Minna Laakso