Transition space repair: A multi-modal analysis of its relevance for turn organization

Abstract

Literature in interactional linguistics and conversation analysis has convincingly shown the emergent, contingent and collaborative nature of units of talk. This presentation reports on a multi-modal analysis of transition space repair and its relevance to constructing units of talk in interaction. Repair in conversation is organized for dealing with troubles in speaking, hearing and understanding the talk. Moreover, it often serves as a vehicle for dealing with other interactional matters, e.g. turn-beginning self-repairs may be produced to manage overlapping talk or address recipiency; self-repair during a sentence-in-progress may be produced to accommodate recipients with various knowledge states; transition space repair may be initiated to pursue response. Built on previous studies on repair and on turn organization, and drawing on video-recorded conversations in Mandarin and Cantonese, we examine speaker’s production of transition space repair from four aspects, namely, syntactic forms, prosodic characteristics, body movement and interactional import. Our aim is to determine how linguistic and bodily resources in producing transition space repair, e.g. their convergence and divergence, work to organize units in interaction. While the term transition space repair presupposes its production upon a turn/TCU’s possible completion (and therefore often syntactic completion), our observation is that its delivery can be differentiated by prosody and/or body. We then choose to focus on transition space repairs which are produced after possible completion of questions and other first or sequence-initiating actions. Our analysis shows that some transition repairs are produced in a latching/rush-through manner, i.e. their prosody diverges from projected syntactic and pragmatic/action completion in that it signals turn continuation. It is interesting to note that in such cases, body movement, e.g. hand gestures tend to converge with prosody. In contrast, transition space repairs may also be produced after absence of verbal response from the recipient. In such cases, the linguistic and body resources often converge to indicate possible completion, and it is only after lack of recipient uptake that the speaker re-opens the just completed turn with a repair. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of these two temporally, prosodically and bodily differentiated transition space repairs with regard to their interactional import and issues of projection and completion in turn organization.