A Corpus-based Study On Self-Repair In Emotion Counseling

Repair is a ubiquitous phenomenon in language and repair organization describes how participants in conversation deal with problems in speaking,hearing,or understanding.Self-repair has attracted much attention at home and abroad since it is proposed by Schegloff et al.(1977)that there is a strong preference for self-repair in conversation.Scholars investigate self-repair in a variety of contexts and cultures and explore the types,reasons and functions of self-repair.Based on the data selected from Chinese host-caller emotion counseling interactions,the present study presents an empirical analysis of the different choices of self-repair strategies and analyzes the functions of self-repair strategies used in emotion counseling.Two research questions are asked: 1)How are the self-repair strategies used in emotion counseling? 2)What are the functions of the self-repair strategies in emotion counseling from the perspective of epistemics?The present study examines the types and functions of self-repair strategies in emotion counseling with an interpretation from the perspective of epistemic status and epistemic stance.Forty phones-in are taken from some emotion counseling interactions to build a mini-corpus,and a total number of 101885 words are obtained.After a through analysis of the self-repair strategies in the corpus,several findings are made:First,altogether eight types of self-repair strategies are employed in emotion counseling,including replacing,inserting,deleting,searching,parenthesizing,aborting,recycling and reformatting.Both the hosts and the callers tend to use various self-repair strategies to communicate with each other in the process of emotion counseling.To be specific,recycling is the most prominent self-repair strategy,occurring in almost half of all self-repairs.Replacing,inserting and aborting are also used more frequently,while parenthesizing is the least frequently employed self-repair strategy.Second,both the hosts and the callers employ different self-repair strategies todisplay and compete for their epistemic authority in order to have the rights to speak on behalf of themselves since the main tasks in emotion counseling are to seek and give the information,and to offer and obtain help.This study explores the real communication between the hosts and the callers in the natural context of Chinese emotion counseling interaction,which can further deepen our understanding of natural conversation,institutional interaction and self-repair.