A Cross-linguistic Study of Self-repair

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT NSF Proposal 0406512 A Cross-linguistic Study of Self-repair Co-PIs: Barbara A. Fox, University of Colorado, Boulder and Fay Wouk, University of Auckland With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Barbara Fox of the University of Colorado, Boulder, will conduct collaborative research with Dr. Fay Wouk of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. This research project explores the conversational phenomenon of self-repair in 14 languages. Self-repair is the process by which a speaker stops the sentence they are producing and then modifies it in some way. A speaker may repeat a word or phrase just produced, insert a word or phrase, begin the sentence again in a new way, or modify the structure in other ways, for example, And she- this girl's fixed up on a da- a blind date. In this sentence, the speaker stops the utterance and then replaces the pronoun 'she' with the noun phrase 'this girl'and then continues with the utterance. Later in the utterance the speaker appears to begin the phrase 'a date'and then redoes the phrase to insert the word 'blind.' Self-repair is thus a very powerful mechanism for altering the syntax of a sentence as it is being produced. Although self-repair may at first seem like the ultimate in disfluency and ungrammaticality, in fact it appears to be highly organized. We could even say that there is a grammar to self-repair. Moreover, this "grammar" appears to vary from language to language. For example, in our exploration of self-repair in Japanese and Korean, we found that the repetition of whole phrases-as in the above example-is extremely rare, while it is not uncommon in American English self-repair. A variety of explanations have been offered for the different "grammars" of self-repair in different languages. The research team in this project will analyze data from a wide range of languages, most of them unrelated and from different areas of the world, displaying a wide range of structures, in the hopes of understanding the scope of self-repair as a human-language phenomenon and testing past explanations regarding its cross-linguistic variation.