Delaying the next item due in conversation: GE and DE in Cantonese and Mandarin self-repair

This paper reports a study on delaying the next item due as a self-repair practice in Cantonese and Mandarin talk-in-interaction. Pioneering studies of repair in English conversation (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977, Schgloff 1979 ) have shown that a forward-oriented self-repair may be initiated by sound stretching, ‘uh’s or recycling a bit of the just produced part of talk. Repair is also known for its close relationship to syntax-forconversation e.g. Schegloff 1979). Fox, Hayashi and Jasperson’s (1996) comparative study on English and apanese point out that certain differences in repair practices are best explained in terms of syntactic differences in the two languages. While it is possible in English to delay the next noun due by recycling the grammaticalmaterials before it (e.g. preposition and article), the same procedure is not available for repair in Japanese because the phrasal-initial materials in English come after the noun in Japanese.In this presentation we examine the repair practice in two varieties of Chinese, namely Mandarin and Cantonese.According to Chinese grammar, the elements in a noun phrase are organized in such a way that the head nouncomes last with a structural particle, DE in Mandarin and GE in Cantonese, linking the adjective and the noun(e.g. Li & Thompson 1981, Matthew & Yip 1994):Demonstrative – numeral – classifier – adjective – (DE/GE) – nounAlthough GE and DE serve a similar function in NP, they do not behave exactly in the same way in repairpractices when the head noun is delayed. While GE may be recycled on its own as shown in (1), DE is oftenrecycled together with the pre-noun material as shown in (2).(1) Cantonese我哋 係 好 少 有 咁 長 嘅 (.) 嘅 凍 嘅 時間 嘅。ngodei hai hou siu jau gam coeng ge ge dung ge sigaan gewe BE seldom have so long GE GE cold GE time PT195‘We seldom experience such a long cold spell.’(2) Mandarin就 相當於: 那- 那- 初步 的 : 初步 的 : (XX) 的 結果 嘛:jiu xiangdangyu na na chubu de chubu de de jieguo majust similar.to that that preliminary DE preliminary DE DE result PT‘It’s similar to that- that- preliminary: preliminary: (xx) result. ’Based on two sets of recordings --- one from video or audio recordings of conversations between friends, theother from ‘media talk’ recorded from TV programs, a number of patterns of repair involving GE and DE havebeen identified and will be examined in detail in the presentation. Our findings show that although bothCantonese and Mandarin noun phrases are head-final, there are differences in the recycling pattern of phrasalinitialmaterials.