Volume 14
Graduate Working Papers

Repair Strategies in Conversational Kickapoo

Jule Gomez de Garcia
University of Colorado Boulder
Bio

Keywords

  • narrative, syntax, conversation, kickapoo

How to Cite

de Garcia, J. G. (1995). Repair Strategies in Conversational Kickapoo. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 14. https://doi.org/10.25810/x81d-mc97

Abstract

Syntactic repair is one strategy used by participants in conversations to take or maintain turns, to correct usage errors, or to replace an element with a contextually more appropriate element. Two types of syntactic repairs, recyclings and replacements, used by an elderly native Kickapoo speaker in narratives about her ancestors are examined here. Recycled repairs include the repetition of already uttered elements of the sentence and it is proposed here that the speaker uses this strategy to delay as she searches for lexical items needed later in the sentence. The replacement repairs made by this speaker are interesting for the morphological structures of the repaired and repairing items and for what those structures indicate about the morphology of polysynthetic languages.