Appealing to a Broker: Initiating Third-person Repair in Mundane Second Language Interaction
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Interactional repair usuallyinvolves one or two primary participants, meaning that either the speaker of a trouble source attemptsto deal with it on his or her ownor else a recipient initiates the repair and sometimes provides a candidate solution. However, occasionally a third person may also become involved in a form of repair thathas been called ‘brokering’. Such brokers mediate the talk, providing the primary recipient with assistance in dealing with the trouble, particularly in cases wherethe recipientis an L2 speaker. Brokering therefore momentarily reconstitutes the participant constellation and invokes relevant identity categories and epistemic hierarchies. Adopting a Conversation Analytic approach, I buildon this line of inquiry by examining a collection of cases in whicha novice speaker of English appeals to a third person for brokering, highlighting sequential, embodied and epistemic features of the talk in both successful and aborted bids for brokering. The data are taken from a corpus of multi-party dinner table talk video-recorded in a homestay context.
Author: Tim Greer
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2186896145