Research On The Phenomenon Of Repair In Conversation

In accordance with the findings of naturally-occurring conversation by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, there exists a phenomenon of 'repair' in conversation. The term 'repair' refers to not only the correction of real mistakes, but also the correction of inappropriateness of word-selection, morphology and syntax which often occur in daily conversation. It is illustrated in such circumstances as that the speaker perfects his utterance constantly during the production of speech, the hearer mishears, misunderstands and even does not hear what the speaker has said. Meanwhile, Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks presented a tendency of preference of repair in conversation. Self-repair (whether self-initiated or not) is much more frequent than other-repair; self-initiation repair (whether self-repair or not) is much more than other-initiation.This paper focuses on the repair organization in conversation, adopts conversation analysis and takes the news interview programs broadcast by BBC World Service as the main research subject. First of all, the applicability of preference of repair in. news interviews is tested, and then, repair in conversation from the perspective of psycholinguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and context are analyzed, and an elementary discussion is made so as to give an explanation of the preference of repair. In data collection, the author adopted a popular method in oral discourse analysis-conversation analysis to record and process the raw materials. On the basis of that, transcribing the recordings and gain a great amount of data as the research subject. The statistical results indicate that there does exist a tendency of the preference of repair in news interviews. Although the ration of repair types in news interview and that in Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks' s researches is discrepant, the overall tendency is consistent. In the latter part of the thesis, the author analyzes the repair organization from the perspective of psycholinguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and context.The above analysis and discussions could provide evidence for the perfection of repair theory, and present a new research field for the mentioned linguistic subjects. It is expected that this paper might arouse the attention of domestic linguistic experts and scholars so as to promote the development of domestic linguistic research.