| Repair is a pervasive phenomenon in conversational discourse in which one or more of the participants addresses a perceived breakdown or other source of potential trouble in the flow of the discourse. This thesis is a study of self-repair. In this type of repair, the production of the current conversational turn is interrupted by the speaker of the turn, after which the turn is continued with one of several types of self-repair operations, which function to repeat, replace, insert, delete, or otherwise modify some earlier segment of the turn. Because of the pervasiveness of self-repair in human conversational interaction, a thorough understanding of self-repair is important, both for an adequate theoretical account of grammar as it is deployed in conversation and for application to the design of interactive computer systems, especially spoken language understanding systems.; This thesis presents a descriptive account of self-repair based on an analysis of conversations in which the participants were engaged in three different types of task-oriented dialogues. The description includes the different types of self-repair operations, their frequencies of occurrence, the structural positions in which they occur more or less frequently within turns and within turn construction units, and the structure of the segment of the turn that performs the repair. The following properties of self-repair are discussed: (1) self-repair is "recipient designed"; (2) self-repair must be accounted for in terms of interactive and interpretive processes, rather than mechanistic manipulations of surface forms; and (3) although self-repair operates on syntactic structure, it functions not to achieve grammatical well-formedness, but rather to achieve efficient and effective conversational interaction. In addition, a number of specific findings regarding the structure and function of self-repair in conversation are discussed. These findings include the effects of turn and grammatical structure on repair frequency, the relationship between overlap and repair, the iconic function of repair cues, the interactive reinterpretation of the structure of repaired material, and the function of frames of repeated material in the construction of self-repairs. |
