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AbstractThe present study investigated self-initiated self-repair in Persian language. This study was aimed towards examining the strategies used in self-initiated self-repair as well as the frequency of these strategies. Besides, the present study intended to mull over the preferences and priorities in using various operations employed by Persian native speakers in story-retelling. Moreover, the study also addressed the relationship between the participants’ gender and the use of repair strategies. As for the data collection, this study approached 20 male and 20 female participants in the age range of 20 to 40. Moreover, the data involved 374 minutes of story-retelling, showing the employment of all repair operations based on Schegloff’s framework (2013). The findings of this research indicate that non-lexical repair and sequence jumping are the most and the least used strategies, respectively. Replacing, recycling, and searching were identified as the most used strategies while three strategies namely parenthesizing, reformatting, sequence jumping, were recognized as the least used strategies. In relation to gender, although women's use of repair operations was identified more, no significant difference was observed between female and male participants in this regard. Since this study investigates repair in monologues, it might lead to the development of the investigations in this area.Keywords: Repair Strategies; Story-Retelling; Self-Initiated Self-Repair; Conversation Analysis; Persian IntroductionVerbal communication can be performed through spoken and written medium. In verbal communication, the main goal is to establish an interaction between the participants who try to play their role accurately in order to established a meaningful interaction. The speaker’ intention is to convey the message correctly so that it can be understood and interpreted by the listener. Despite that, the occurrence of problems in the course of communication is inevitable. This is mainly because during the production process, the speakers mentally monitor their speech and notice any inconsistency with the considered communication content; therefore, they have the opportunity to repair the source of the problem.According to Schegloff (1997), repair does not necessarily mean correcting an error, but sometimes the speaker may just replace an element. Following Schegloff et al. (1977) and Fox et al. (1996), Reiger (2003) considers repair a process that includes error correction, searching for a word, pauses, lexical changes, repetition, and correction of false starts. In order to categorize repairs one may refer to the person who initiates it and the person who performs it. As a result, there are four main types of repairs (Schegloff et.al., 1977: 262-263) which includes self-initiated self-repair, other-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, and other-initiated other-repair.Schegloff et. al. (1977) believe that repair is implemented using regular and specific initiation strategies, including lexical and non-lexical elements. Schegloff (2013) introduces ten lexical strategies in conversations, which were the basis of this research. These strategies include replacing, inserting, deleting, searching, paranthesizing, aborting, sequence jumping, recycling, reformatting, and reordering.The scholarly works conducted in Persian have been in multi-participant conversations. But in the current research, the focus was on the repairs carried out in the story re-telling by one speaker. The main goal is to investigate self-initiated self-repair in which the speaker notices the elements that need repair and starts it him/herself. Reiger (2003:48) believes that this type of repair is the most common one in which both the component that needs repair and the repaired element occur at the same time and the speaker implements it as the initiator.Thus said, the present research is aimed towards providing justifiable answers to the following enquiries.What repair strategies are used in summarizing and retelling the story?What are preferences in using the strategies?Is there a significant difference between the use of self-initiated self-repair and gender? Materials and MethodsThe present descriptive-analytical research consisted of 20 men and 20 women aging from 20-40 years. The participants were selected of the educated people of the city of Kerman through availability sampling. The participants were asked to provide a 5-7 minute summary of one of the fictions they have recently read or one of the movies recently watched. Then the recorded audios were transcribed using Jefferson’s approach (2004), and analyzed applying Schegloff’s framework (2013). Utterances containing repairs, from the 374 minutes of recorded files, were identified. Their frequencies were calculated. Then, in order to statistically examine the difference between the frequency of self-repair strategies and gender, the chi-square test was run. Discussion and ConclusionsIn response to the first question, the data indicated that the participants used all types of repairs based on Schegloff (2013), which is in accordance to other studies in the literature (Al-Harahshe, 2015(.In this research, self-initiated self-repair, which had the highest application, was investigated. The high frequency of this type of repair has also been observed in previous studies (Schegloff et. al., 1977). It is considered natural because the element that needs repair is mainly recognized and repaired by the speaker him/herself. Heike (1981, p.148) considers self-repair as a tool for quality control and views self-initiated self-repair as the most efficient type of repair.The second question focuses on the pattern of using repair strategies according to the number and percentage of their occurrence. The results showed that, on the whole, 610 repairs occurred using all strategies. The participants mostly used non-lexical initiators in the form of a pause. This finding is in accordance with the results of studies on repair in English (including Schegloff et. al., 1977; Colman & Healey 2011; and Saputri 2015), in which non-lexical initiators are preferred over lexical ones.Findings showed that replacing and recycling were the other most frequently used repair strategies. The previous studies in this field also indicates the high frequency of these two strategies. According to Saputri (2015), replacing occurs when the speaker does not regard what is said as appropriate, or when a mistake occurs in the choice of words. Tang (2011) explains the high frequency of replacement referring to Grice's (1975) quality maxim. The speaker uses this repair to avoid an understanding which is different from the intended message. In fact, since the speaker considers him/herself responsible for the correct understanding of the listener, he/she uses replacing in order to ensure an understanding in line with his/her intention. The motivation for this repair is the speaker’s maximum effort to improve the informational content of the speech.Moreover, regarding the high frequency of recycling, Heike (1981) states that the speaker's goal is to produce speech with more accurate planning and less mistakes, and for this purpose, he/she repeats a part of his/her speech if needed. Based on the findings, sequence jumping is observed to be the least used strategy in this research. It occurs when the speaker moves away from the main topic and deems the previous statement less important for the listener (Hieke, 1981). The low frequency of this strategy can be related to Grice's relevance maxim (1975).Regarding the similarities in different studies in the use of self-repair strategies, Fox et al. (2010) believe that these similarities can also be attributed to the common typological features of languages. Also, Kormos (1999: 333-334) attributes these similarities to the psychological mechanisms of speech monitoring applied by the speaker.To answer the third question, Chi-square test was run to check the existence of a significant difference between the occurrence of repair strategies in men and women. Although, 51.6% of repairs were used by women and 48.4% by men, the chi-square value obtained was equal to 3.17 and the degree of freedom and probability value between 10 and 0.97, respectively. Therefore, there was no significant difference between men's and women's repair strategies. The finding was in line with Fotovatnia and Dorri (2013) which showed that there was no significant difference between men and women by English language learners in Iran in single and mixed gender classes.Finally, regarding the preference of using different strategies, we can mention the interactive role of repair. In fact, the intention of the speaker to properly convey his/her meaning and present a complete and clear image despite the time limit in summarizing the story, focusing on the use of Persian words, preventing the use of words due to lack of time is among the extra-linguistic factors that were effective. |
