Center for Language Acquisition Invited Speaker Series

Speaker: Galina Bolden

Abstract:

Repair organization—a central mechanism for maintaining intersubjectivity in conversation—is a system of interactional practices for dealing with problems of hearing, speaking, and understanding (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Among the different types of repair, other-initiated other-repair—that is, repair initiated and resolved by a recipient of a trouble source—is the least understood. In other-initiated other-repair sequences, an interactant self-selects to enact “other-correction” of some problematic aspect of another’s talk. In this presentation, I examine what occasions other-correction, how such corrections are carried out, what actions they accomplish, and how they are responded to. I also explore some analytic payoffs of closely examining other-correction sequences and discuss how, through these sequences, interactants negotiate their competence and accountability for the error and patrol and enforce rules of language use and conduct. The analysis draws on a large dataset of recorded conversational materials in English and Russian languages.

Bio:

Galina Bolden (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is Professor of communication at Rutgers University. She conducts conversation analytic research in Russian and English languages, both in ordinary conversation and in institutional settings. Her research examines how participants enact and negotiate their cultural identities and personal relationships in and through talk-in-interaction. She is a co-author (with Alexa Hepburn) of Transcribing for Social Research (2017) and co-editor (with John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen) of Responding to Polar Questions Across Languages and Contexts (2023).