Abstract

Other-initiated self-repair is analyzed as a type of largely routinized activity by which discourse participants effectively treat conversational trouble as "unproblematic problems" (Berger & Luckmann 1966). By performing repairs, participants succeed - most of the time - in maintaining the character of ongoing conversations as everyday non-problematic routines. From the point of view of the outside observer, this means that repairs, and repair initiations in particular, are not only of interest insofar as they are structural phenomena on the level of sequential discourse organization. They are also interpreted as cues by which participants, in order to overcome perceived trouble, display intentions and interpretations by making them manifest to their co-participants. lt is emphasized, however, that intentionally making a certain mental state ( e.g., experiencing a certain problem of understanding) manifest is independent of actually "being in" that mental state. A second main goal of this paper is to develop a typology of repairs that is based on correlations between specific linguistic and non-linguistic means of repair initiation, on the one hand, and particular types of manifest interactional trouble, on the other hand.