Meredith Stokoe 2014 DC repair IR.pdf (754.18 kB)
Repair: comparing Facebook 'chat' with spoken interaction
journal contribution
posted on 2015-07-01, 14:42 authored by Joanne Meredith, Elizabeth StokoePrevious research on the conversation analytic phenomenon of ‘repair’ has focused on its design
and function in spoken interaction. Conversely, research on written text or writing rarely focuses
on interaction. In this article, we examine repair in written discourse; specifically in online settings.
The data corpus comprises one-to-one quasi-synchronous Facebook ‘chat’. First, we show that,
as in spoken interaction, repair happens. This basic observation supports conversation analytic
arguments that features of talk, like repair and laughter, do not ‘leak randomly’ into interaction
but are precision-timed and designed to accomplish action. Second, we report on two types of
repair: visible repair which can be seen and oriented to by both participants in the interaction,
and message construction repair, which is available only to the message’s writer. While the practice
of message construction repair is made possible through the affordances of the online medium,
it nevertheless shows how participants in written interaction are oriented to the same basic
contingencies as they are in spoken talk: building sequentially organized courses of action and
maintaining intersubjectivity. We suggest that assumptions about differences between spoken and
online interaction are premature. Rather, we argue that online interaction should be treated as
an adaptation of an oral speech-exchange system.
Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number: ES/ I903321/1].
History
Published in
DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATIONVolume
8Issue
2Pages
181 - 207 (27)Citation
MEREDITH, J. and STOKOE, E., 2014. Repair: comparing Facebook 'chat' with spoken interaction. Discourse and Communication, 8 (2), pp. 181 - 207.Publisher
Sage Publications / © The Author(s)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013-12-18Copyright date
2014Notes
This is an accepted version of an article subsequently published in the journal, Discourse and Communication [Sage Publications / © The Author(s)]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750481313510815ISSN
1750-4813eISSN
1750-4821Publisher version
Language
- en