1. The Division of Labor in Conversational Repair in a Family Sign Language from Guatemala: Who Makes It Work?
- Author
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Laura Horton
- Abstract
The term "repair" refers to strategies deployed by language users to resolve breakdowns in communication. In this study, I ask what strategies for conversational repair are deployed, and who takes responsibility for their execution, when a language is used in a small local signing ecology. I focus on signers from a single family within a larger speech community that does not use a national signed language and analyze conversations from four dyads of signers who engaged in a "director-matcher" referential communication task. I find that for three of the four dyads, there is a preference for "restricted" repairs that closely matches studies of repair in other signed and spoken languages. I also find a strong connection between participant role and repair type--with matchers more likely to use other-initiated repairs while directors produced self-repairs. The findings from this study highlight the complex relationship between participant identities and pragmatic strategies and the complicated social function of different types of repair in interaction.
- Published
- 2024
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