Other-repair in Semi-institutional Discourse

This study aims to examine other-repair in Chinese talk-in-interaction, especially TV talk shows defined as “semi-institutional discourse” on the basis of conversation analysis and its methodology. The author collected 277 extracts from Chinese TV talk shows and conducts systematic classification and exploration of other-repair by integrating the existing analytic framework. This study, in particular, proves the relatedness between the frequent occurrence of other-repair and the nature of the discourse to which it belongs. It has contributed to four aspects: (1) basic trajectories of other-repair and its types of arising environment; (2) the causes of other-repair; (3) initiation techniques, placements of other-repair and repair strategies; (4) explaining the characteristics of other-repair in Chinese TV talk shows. This study has empirical significance in that it is a research attempt at the study on Chinese other-repairs under the semi-institutional setting, which has furthered the relevant linguistic findings, especially in conversation analysis of Chinese talks.