Repairs in Extemporaneously Created Utterances

Abstract

Repairs are a small, yet important mechanism and structual unit of extemporaneously created utterances. The analysis is based on the approaces of discourse analysis, particularly converasion analysis. Repair is a retrograde structure, i.e., from the action point of view on the syntagmatic axis it is markes by backtracking. The analysis of the pragmatic aspects shows that repairs ussualy originate in the psychological dimension of the discourse, i.e., in the intention of the speaker to align the text with the altered strategy or to correct an error or difficulties on expressing him-/herself. the analysis of the structure of repairs shows that they include three obligatory elements: the repaired, the interruption and repair, and often there is one more repair devices between the interruption and the repair. In the analyzed material, i.e., in the spoken corpus of telephone conversations in turism, repairs occur in 8% of all utterances.