Managing Trouble Responsibility and Relationships During Conversational Repair

Using conversation analysis, this article focuses on other-initiation of repair (e.g., What?, I'm sorry?) of trouble speaking, hearing, and understanding. This article shows that the act of managing relationships is an essential feature of other-initiation of repair, and that different practices of repair-initiation can constitute different relational events that have different behavioral outcomes. Specifically, this article: (1) argues that context-free structures of interaction bias practices of repair such that other-initiated repair is vulnerable to communicating a stance that responsibility for trouble belongs to the speaker of the talk that inspired the repair-initiation; (2) discusses the implications of trouble responsibility for interpersonal disalignment and the organization of subsequent interaction; and (3) focuses on open-class (Drew, 1997 Drew, P. 1997. “Open” class repair initiators in response to sequential sources of troubles in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 28: 69–101. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) practices of repair initiation and argues that the apology-based format (I'm sorry? or Sorry?) communicates a stance that trouble responsibility belongs to repair-initiators, rather than to their addressees.