Introduction

We noted in Chapter 1 that referring to people, objects and other entities in the world is central to verbal communication: “the most crucial feature of each utterance, the feature which a listener must minimally grasp in order to begin to understand the utterance, is the expression used to identify what the speaker is talking about” (Brown 1995: 62). Like other aspects of language production and comprehension, however, referring is sometimes problematic enough to warrant repair. And like most repairs, repairs of references are largely self-initiated and self-completed (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977): we typically locate and remedy problems in our own speech on our own. Since we often talk our way through our repairs – pausing, interrupting words (phrases, clauses, sentences) in progress, restarting, replacing – the verbal details of our problematic referrals are audible to others and available for their inspection. Still, it is not always easy for us, as listeners or as analysts, to know why what another has said has become problematic in the first place or how it will (or will not) be resolved.

Consider the segments in Example 2.1, in which bold indicates the site at which the repair is initiated; if the repaired referent remains the same at self-completion, I use bold italics; if it differs, I italicize (but do not bold) the repair.