Epistemics And Conversational Repair

In our daily interaction, conversational repair is omnipresent. Repair is a procedural, interactant-administered, contextually managed and recipient-designed means by which understanding in talk is achieved, maintained and even defended within the sequential interaction. Repair helps to sustain social communication by having interactants mutually to handle interactional troubles, hitches, misunderstandings, and errors. Research into repair is an indispensable part in the study of conversation.Scholars in Conversation Analysis (CA) have investigated and studied repair from different perspectives. The previous researches focus on types, trajectories, sequence organizations, and linguistic features of repair. Although repair has been studied from different perspectives, researchers in CA have rarely taken a broader approach as to how the repair exists. In this research, an investigation of repair would be undertaken under the underpinnings of epistemics, aiming at analyzing how the imbalance of epistemic domains and knowledge claims between co-interactants responsively and collaboratively comes into play when repair is initiated and executed. It is hoped that through observing and examining the collected data, we can discover the significance and the impact of epistemics in conversational repair.We notice that the driving force and ultimate warrant of repair is epistemics. Information or knowledge imbalance between participants plays a vital role in the motivation of initiation and execution of repair. When a repair initiator conveys that there is an imbalance of information or knowledge territory between the initiator and the repairer, this indication is adequate to motivate and warrant a repair sequence that would be closed when this imbalance is acknowledged to be equalized. The three types of repair are prone to be investigated under epistemics in that they concern the interplay of different epistemic domains and epistemic statuses of two participants. For other-initiated self-repair and other-initiated other-repair, if the recipient figures that the initiator is in a K+ position relative to the discussed item or the repairable, the recipient would be more likely to recognize the initiation as implementing a K+ action. K+ action indicates its speaker’s disagreement to the discussed item. The second is that when the recipient figures that the speaker is in a K- position relative to the discussed item, the recipient would be more likely to recognize it as implementing a K- action. K- action indicates either the producer’s lack of understanding of the information or a lack of adequate hearing of the information. For self-initiated other-repair, the initiator usually initiates the repair by a word searching for a name, term, complaint or delicate subject matter and the recipient executes the repair by proffering an option. The initiator of the trouble source is considered to be implementing a K+ action indexing hesitating in delicate formulations or just engaging in recalling.This research provides a macro and dynamic way to investigate and understand repair using the principles and theories of epistemics. It expounds the feasibility of applying epistemics to studying repair and probes into how social action could be formed and understood in repair, proposing a theoretical interpretation and comprehensive understanding of repair.