Self-repair in Chinese, Russian, and Czech narrative discourse

Abstract

This study investigated repetition, replacement, and morphological repairs in narrative discourse across Taiwan Mandarin, Russian, and Czech to identify common and language-specific self-repair patterns in sister and non-sister languages. Repair rate, recycling scope, and morphosyntactic features of trouble sources and recycled constituents were analyzed. Repetition repair was the most frequent type to delay speech production across all languages. The trouble source was typically resolved without repeating other words. When recycling occurred, repeating a single word was the most common pattern. In word-internal interruptions, Russian and Czech demonstrated similar practices of root repetition and affix replacement. Morphosyntactic constraints on repair accounted for a small portion of the data. Speakers of all three languages prioritized a discourse strategy of “prompt resolution and minimal alteration” of the constructed structure and semantic content to resume fluent speech, even in narrative contexts without time pressure or interactional demands.