A Study of Repair Organization in Persian Television Interviews

Repair is a common phenomenon in everyday speech of all languages including Persian. Repair is an utterance uttered by the speaker himself or the listener to substitute a previously uttered speech in conversation. Repair organization is studied within conversation analysis which examines everyday talk in the form of audio and visual data. The present study aims at studying different types of repairs, their positions within the sequence of turns, the frequency of the occurrence of different types of repairs, and the accompanying lexical and non-lexical initiator techniques in 426 minutes of recorded Persian live television interviews. The findings of the study reveals that in general, the turns and the positions in which different types of repairs occur in Persian television interviews are the same as those described by Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977) for American English everyday conversations. Moreover, in line with their observation for American English, it is realized that self- repair predominates over other-repair in the data and non-lexical initiators are more frequently used than lexical ones. Finally, with regard to the interactional function of repairs in conversation, the analysis of the data indicates that there are some factors outside the language that can affect the type and position of repairs in Persian television interviews. Some such factors include commitment to using Persian vocabulary, giving more information to viewers about the topic of the interview, and to shorten the conversation either because of the shortage of time or because of taking viewer's beliefs and susceptibilities into consideration.