Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
interaction, the use of recordings extends the range and precision of the observations
that can be made. It permits other researchers to have direct access to the data about
which claims are being made, thus making analysis subject to detailed public scrutiny
and helping to minimize the influence of personal preconceptions or analytical biases.
Finally, it may be noted that because the data are available in 'raw' form they can be
reused in a variety of investigations and can be re-examined in the context of new
findings. All of these major advantages derive from the fact that the original data are
neither idealized nor constrained by a specific research design or by reference to some
particular theory or hypothesis.
As already alluded to, those working within the conversation analytic tradition insist upon the use of
'naturally occurring' conversations as it is only through the systematic examination of actual talk that
we can uncover the fine-grained minute details of conversational interaction. If we wish to illuminate
the methods and procedures which conversationalists employ then we need to have access to their
‘language-in-use’. So there is a strong emphasis within conversation analysis on what actually takes
place during ordinary talk rather than analysts' interpretations or reconstructions of what goes on. In
direct contrast to 'official' linguists, who often create artificial material in order to overcome the
problems associated with the apparently disorderly nature of real-life talk, analysts working within the
conversation analytic tradition have clearly demonstrated that conversation is extremely orderly and
rule-governed. Moreover, this orderliness is produced by the participants themselves, 'making sense
of what one another said or did, and fitting their utterances appropriately to their understandings'
(Drew:1990:29).
Heritage and Atkinson (1984:5), in their critique of speech act theory in linguistics, go to the very
heart of conversation analysis when they state that 'it is sequences and turns within sequences, rather
than isolated sentences or utterances, that have become the primary unit of analysis'. This interest in
the sequential organisation of interaction has produced a substantial and cumulative body of work
which has helped to uncover the fundamental structures of talk-in-interaction. The initial concern was
to describe and explicate the basic organisational features of ordinary conversation, such as the turntaking
system 8 , adjacency pairs 9 , preference organisation 10 and repair 11 . Subsequent studies have
steadily built upon these foundations and in recent years there has been an enormous upsurge in
8 The turn-taking system as outlined by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) provides a general
model of the way in which turns are organised and allocated in ordinary conversations (see Section 4.1
of this paper for a more detailed examination of this model).
9 Closely related to the turn-taking system, the concept of an adjacency pair refers to a particular set of actions
where the first pair part sequentially implicates the production of a second specific complementary action.
Examples include question and answer; greeting and return greeting; offer and acceptance/rejection (see Section
4.2 of this paper for an elaboration of this point).
10 Preference organisation refers to the fact that there are systematic differences in the design of these
responses to the extent that some are preferred (in terms of structural complexity rather than
psychological desires) and some are dispreferred. Preferred responses (e.g accepting an invitation or
agreeing to a request) usually have a simple structure and are generally performed straightforwardly
and without delay whereas dispreferred responses tend to be structurally more complex and are
characteristically delayed, qualified and accounted for (e.g refusing an offer or turning down an
invitation). It is worth noting, in the current context, that speakers often indicate the status of a
dispreferred turn by starting it with markers such as ‘Well’ or ‘Um’ (Hutchby & Woffitt, 1998:44).
11 We can define repair as the 'general technical name for the processes through which we fix
conversational problems (or in some cases non-problems)' (Nofsinger, 1991:124). Schegloff, Jefferson and
Sacks (1990:31-61), in their analysis of the organization of repair in conversation, draw our attention to a
number of important distinctions. First, they highlight the need to distinguish between the initiation of
repair (the noticing or marking of a source of trouble) and the outcome of this process (the actual repair
itself). It is also necessary to differentiate between 'self' and 'other' initiation and repair, in terms of who
actually produces it. Although Schegloff et al. (1990:32) draw a distinction between 'self-repair' and 'otherrepair'
they emphasise the organisational relationship between them which manifests itself in a preference
for self-repair and, indeed, they make this relationship a central theme of their paper. They point out that
'even casual inspection of talk in interaction finds self-correction more common than other-correction' and
this leads to an exploration of the mechanisms which operate in individual cases to produce this 'observed
over-all skewed distribution' (Schegloff et al. 1990:32). In relation to preference organization, then, selfrepair
predominates over other-repair and there is an additional preference for self-initiation of repair.
Although, the conversation analytic literature on repair is clearly relevant to the issue of stammering it
will not be discussed in any detail in the current paper (see Levinson 1983:339-345; Nofsinger 1991:124-
132 for a summary of the relevant issues).
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