WAYS OF RESTARTING

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways of restarting after self-interruption in the cases of error- and inappropriatness repairs. The research has been conducted on a sample of 101 students at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split. The classification of self-repairs is based on Levelt's model of speech production, as the empirically best supported theory of monolingual speech processing. Students have been individually tested by performing five speech tasks: story narration, room description, room description with different furniture arrangement compared to the previous task, utterance formulation based on pictures and story telling based on a sequence of pictures. If the speaker decides to correct an observed speech error, instant repairing as a way of restarting will be used in the absolute majority of cases. On the other hand, repairs of errors are rarely made by fresh starts. However, fresh starts are the most frequent way of appropriateness repairs in the repair corpus. Furthermore, the speakers adhere to certain rules in order to help listeners understand the communicative intention after correction. It follows that the ways of restarting are not chaotic and disorganized processes, on the contrary, they are systematically organized phenomena based on rules.