This edited volume presents the latest work on repair by leading scholars in the interdisciplinary field of conversation analysis (CA). It emphasizes the centrality of repair in the organization of human social interaction. Through repair, participants manage problems of speaking, hearing, or understanding in interaction. For instance, a recipient may seek clarification of the previous turn (e.g. Huh?), or a speaker may interrupt their own turn-in-progress and reformulate it in anticipation of a misunderstanding. Repair thus enables the accomplishment and maintenance of mutual understanding or intersubjectivity, an issue at the heart of the social sciences.
Early work in CA, summarized in the introduction to this volume, established the basic principles of the organization of repair. This includes distinctions between self- and other-repair (self being the speaker of the trouble source) and between initiation and completion of repair. Several chapters in the current volume (especially chapters 2, 10, and 12) further develop our understanding of this organization of repair. Others (especially chapter 3–9) focus on the ‘interactional import’ and the connections between repair, action formation, and issues of epistemics and intersubjectivity.
The introduction situates CA work on repair within broader concerns in the social sciences and provides an overview of the volume. The remaining eleven chapters are informally divided into two parts, with chapters 2–7 focusing on aspects of self-repair, while chapters 8–12 examine aspects of other-initiated repair. Emanuel Schegloff's contribution in chapter 2 focuses on ten operations implemented in same-turn self-repair, such as replacing, inserting, or deleting. His account necessarily leaves out many aspects of the organization of repair, including next-turn repair initiation, other-initiated repair, and the interactional import of any single instance of repair, among others, which are taken up in the following chapters.
Chapters 3–7 focus on the interactional import of repair. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the relationship between self-repair and action formation, focusing on offers and requests (chapter 3) and the construction of impropriety through delicate formulations (chapter 4). Chapter 5 focuses on the role of epistemics in the reformulation of questions through self-repair, while chapter 6 takes up self-repair in the courtroom. Chapter 7 completes the self-repair section with a consideration of I-mean-prefaced utterances in complaining actions.
Chapters 8–12 shift the focus to other-initiated repair (OIR), expanding the empirical coverage to include interactions with very young children (Mardi Kidwell, chapter 8) and diverse languages (chapter 10 on Japanese and chapter 12 on OIR in twenty-one unrelated languages). These chapters represent a promising trend of comparative analyses in recent CA work. After decades of work on the organization of conversation in American English and a few other well-known languages, it is now possible to test the findings in other linguistic and cultural settings. In this way we can begin to uncover the essentials of human sociality across languages and cultures.
While not a handbook on repair for the uninitiated, this book does present an excellent overview of current research on this important topic.
