Study Of Interactivity Of Other-initiated Self-repair In Chinese Coversation

Research of conversation repair is initiated by three American sociologists: Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks. This dissertation mainly focuses on one category of repair: other-initiated self-repair, which means the repair is initiated by other people rather than the speaker himself, and carried out by the speaker. This kind of conversation repair includes four steps, namely the occurrence of trouble source, initiation, repair and feedback, all of which constitute a complete process.This dissertation concentrates on the four steps mentioned above in terms of form and function. Altogether 215 instances of conversation repair were collected for our analysis.Trouble source can occur in forms of a sentence, a phrase or a word. It functions negatively in interpersonal communication. As for the form of initiation, there are interrogatives (including interjections that convey interrogative mood), rhetorical questions, interrogative sentence, repetition of parts of previous sentences, and the combination of above forms. The function of initiation in communication falls into three categories: locating the trouble source, indicating how much information the listener receives, and expressing the attitudes, opinions or feelings of the listener.The speaker usually carries out repair according to initiation. The frequently adopted methods of repair are substitution, explanation, supplement, negation, repetition/confirmation and joint usage of several methods. Implementation of repair aims to remove barriers in communication, thus occupying a central place in the whole process. Specifically, repair functions in several ways, which includes making it easier for the listener to locate the referent, making up for the lack of existing knowledge of the listener, removing doubt of the listener, strengthening the speaker's own idea, acknowledging the understanding of the listener and changing the previous opinion of the speaker in order to agree with the listener.The last step of repair is feedback, which can appear in forms of interjection, interrogative, rhetorical questions, imperative sentences, declarative sentences and non-complete sentences. Feedback is carried out by the listener, so its primary function is to express attitudes of the listener towards repair by the speaker. The listener can acknowledge, doubt or refute the repair, he can also encourage the speaker to hold the turn by silence or start a new topic directly without replying to the repair.The four steps of conversation repair reflects the interactivity of communication, and the theory of contribution model in conversation established by Clark and Schaefer makes this characteristic clear. According to this theory, OISR follows a certain trace. In the standard model, trouble source, initiation, implementation of repair, feedback each corresponds to a single turn respectively, and the four turns together constitute a unit of contribution. There are two variations of the standard model. In the first variation, the listener starts a new topic as the presentation phase of the next contribution in the feedback. In the second variation, the speaker directly starts a new topic after repair. There are also some complex forms of repair with more than four turns. Among all the models, the varied models are adopted mostly.