Reordering and Parenthesizing in Chinese conversation

Conversational repair is one of the interactional infrastructures underlying the organization of human interaction. It refers to the mechanism through which participants handle recurrent problems in speaking, hearing and understanding each other’s talk. An increasing body of literature on repair since Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks’s (1977) pioneering work based on American English data have enhanced our understanding of the formal features of repair from a cross-linguistic perspective, and possible functions of repair in given interactional contexts. Due to its structural advantage, same-turn self-repair is the most frequent and common. While many of them target trouble-sources in the turn construction unit (TCU) where repair is initiated, there are cases which target trouble-sources beyond that TCU per se. Two such repair operations are examined in this presentation, namely, reordering and parenthesizing. On the surface, the two share a similar formal pattern in which a TCU is first self-interrupted, and non-projected clausal materials are then produced before the interrupted TCU is resumed. What differentiate the two are their distinct roles in organizing TCUs in multi-unit turns. Reordering addresses the tension between the temporal sequence of the events being recounted and the temporal arrangement of the recounting. The clausal material added through reordering becomes an integral part in the rearrangement of the TCUs in that turn. Parenthesizing addresses the tension between the linearity of speech production and information management, and potential interactional exigencies such as maintaining intersubjectivity.