Speech acts in (inter)action: Repeated questions

The methodologies of speech act research & conversation analysis are profitably integrated to account for two dialogue excerpts involving repeated questions, as the data are argued to be problematic for each approach in isolation. In each case, an interviewer's request for information is repeated as an other-initiated self-repair following the interviewee's signal of noncomprehension; the format of repetitions varies across conventionally indirect acts, locution-derivable directives, & direct wh-questions. These differences of pragmalinguistic formatting are associated with different sociopragmatic meanings & can only be analyzed by the close examination of local sequential context used in conversation analysis, given the stable social relationship between the participants. 1 Appendix, 18 References. J. Hitchcock