Introduction

For humans, social action is, by its very nature, embedded in the rich semiotic structures of the life-world. Such structure not only provides the background against which particular actions are recognizable but also the raw materials out of which they are constructed in the first place. In talk-in-interaction, social action is built up out of the particular prosodic, lexical, and grammatical resources of a given language and is thus necessarily endowed with a partially language-specific character. In this chapter, I show that the use of “if” as a preface to next-turn repeats provides speakers of Caribbean English Creoles with apparently unique possibilities for social action with no clear analogue in other languages.

In their basic, canonical use, “if”-prefaced repeats are used to initiate repair of a prior turn formatted as a “yes”/“no” question (YNQ). In this sequential context, the “if”-preface acknowledges the ongoing activity of questioning even while it suspends it in order to initiate repair. This use of “if”-prefacing appears to be a reflex of grammar in language varieties which, unlike many other varieties of English, do not use inversion to form YNQs. We can see this use of “if”-prefaced repeats then as the mobilization of local grammatical resources to solve a generic interactional problem: the problem of conveying that one heard a prior trouble-source turn to be a “yes”/“no” formatted question. This basic usage makes possible a number of other distinct practices quite independent of initiating repair.