An Application of Comparative Corpora of Interactional Data – Toward the Sound Profiles of Sites of Initiation in French and Mandarin Recycling Repair

An Application of Comparative Corpora of Interactional Data – toward the Sound Profiles of Sites of Initiation in French and Mandarin Recycling Repair Helen Kai-yun Chen Phonetics Lab, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan helenkychen@gmail.com Abstract This study examines the sound profiles of sites of initiation in French and Mandarin recycling repair (also disfluent repetitions). 150 examples of disfluent repetitions were extracted from comparative speech corpora of naturally occurred, face-to-face Mandarin and French interaction. By the approach of interactional prosody plus impressionistic judgments, each instance of recycling repair was annotated manually for its prosodic realization, including relative pitch height and duration between the R1/R2 of the repair, as well as silence and other sound cues for initiating the repair. Through comparing the results of acoustic measurements, it is suggested that interlocutors of the two languages may orient to different methods of initiating the repair in spontaneous interaction in that, French speakers tend to incorporate lengthening at the end of R1 plus optional filled pauses to initiate the repair, while Mandarin speakers employ quick cut-offs for repair initiation, followed by immediate repair. 1 Introduction Repair is a commonly occurring phenomenon in face-to-face interaction. During the process of conversational exchanges, speakers often stop before the end of their turns to make adjustments, i.e. to correct, to elaborate, or to qualify what they have said (Jasperson, 1998). As have shown in previous studies by Schegloff (1979) and Schegloff et al. (1977) on repair in natural conversation by the approach of conversation analysis (CA), the type of same-turn, self- initiated repair occurs far more frequently than other-initiated repair. In terms of the sound environment for initiating the repair by CA approach, Schegloff (1979) suggested that the sites of initiation in English self repair may involve a limited number of forms that are sensitive to the most immediate sound environment during production, including cut-off, pause, or filler. It should be noted that Schegloff further pointed out that the location of the site of initiation in English repair could be “after the first sound of a word or just before its last” (1979: 275). To extend Schegloff’s observation on the site of initiation in self-repair further, Fox et al. (2009) reported a cross-linguistic investigation of sites of initiation in same-turn self-repair from seven languages (including Mandarin) with the goal to uncover the universal principles in shaping sites of initiation in recycling and replacement repairs across languages. The current study provides detailed acoustic profiles for the sites of initiating self-repair, extracted from comparative speech corpora of naturally occurred, face-to-face Mandarin and French interaction. Specifically, this study examines the sound profiles of the particular example of recycling repair (or disfluent repetitions, shortened as DR) which is defined as “a brief, sometimes a longer repeat or re-saying of part of the utterance occurring in a conversational turn”, following Schegloff (1987: 71). Below are two examples of recycling repair in French and Mandarin respectively: (1) le [R1] le [R2] terrain commençait à glisser beaucoup (Henry and Pallaud, 2003) the …

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