Abstract for Relevance of Repair to a Syntax-for-Conversation
Emanuel A. Schegloff: "The Relevance of Repair to
Syntax-for-Conversation,"in T. Givon (ed.),
Syntax and Semantics, Volume 12: Discourse and
Syntax (New York: Academic Press, 1979) 261-286.
The theme of this chapter is that the phenomena
elsewhere treated under the rubric "repair" are
potentially relevant to syntax, if syntax be
thought of as "syntax-for-conversation." In
support of this theme, I will try to show:
1. Repair operations affect the form of sentences
and the ordering of elements in them, quite apart
from the sheer fact of their occurrence in
sentences doing so.
2. There are structural pressures, derived from
those types of discourse organization we term
"turn-taking" and the "organization of sequences,"
that tend to concentrate repair in the same turn
as contains what is being repaired and, within
that turn, in the same sentence (or other "turn-
constructional unit").
3. Formal arguments are possible to show that
repair is, in principle, relevant to any sentence.
4. The phenomena of repair that occur in sentences
are orderly and describable.
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