A Comparison of the Application of Different Types of Repair in the Speech of Persian-Speaking Men & Women in Live TV Shows

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Seyed Mohammad Hosseini-Maasoum ¹
• Maliheh Hajian Nezhad, ²

¹ Associate Professor, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

² M.A. in Linguistics, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/jlkd.2022.75529.1089

Abstract

Speech repair, also called conversational repair, as one of the most important instruments for the maintenance of the conversation and preventing communication breach, can be an effective factor in daily conversations and relations. Here, gender, as a sociolinguistic factor, can cause differences in the frequency and manner of using this instrument by speakers. The present study compares Persian-Speaking men and women in using repair in their conversations, as well as the distribution of different types and strategies of repairs. Schegloff’s classification of repair types (1977) and Fox & Jasperson’s (1995) classification of repair strategies were used. The results indicate that, in general, women tend to use significantly more repairs than men do. Although both groups showed a similar pattern of ranking in the frequency of repair types and in both of them self-initiated self-repair had the highest frequency and self-initiated other-repair the lowest frequency, in the meantime, two types of repairs in women had frequencies twice those in men. Moreover, the analysis of the data by means of Fox & Jasperson’s sevenfold classification of repair strategies showed that in both men and women’s speech, “recycle word” was the most frequently used strategy and “aborting syntactic stream and starting new structure” was the least frequently used one while in both strategies, the percentage of use as higher in women’s speech compared to that of men.

Keywords

• Conversation
• Repair
• Schegloff’s Classification of Repair Types
• Fox & Jasperson’s Classification of Repair Strategies
• Gender

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