Introduction

The organization of repair has received sustained interest in the study of language and social interaction over the past decades. Although, until recently, research in this area has based its claims primarily on English materials, there has been a growing interest, especially in the past ten years or so, in exploring how repair operates in languages other than English. This expanding body of research includes studies of German (e.g., Egbert 1996, 1997b, 2004; Selting 1988, 1992, 1996; Uhmann 2001), Japanese (e.g., Fox et al. 1996), Korean (e.g., Kim 1999a, 2001), Thai (e.g., Moerman 1977), and Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Chui 1996; Tao et al. 1999; Wu 2006; Zhang 1998), among others. Some of these studies have focused on the mechanisms of self- and other-initiation of repair in the languages examined (e.g., Chui 1996; Kim 1999a, 2001; Moerman 1977; Zhang 1998), while others have uncovered the linkages between repair and other aspects of interactional practice, such as prosody (e.g., Selting 1996; Tao et al. 1999) and bodily conduct (e.g., Egbert 1996), and still others have explored the relation between repair and syntax from a cross-linguistic perspective (e.g., Fox et al. 1996).

As part of this growing effort to understand the organization of repair across languages, this chapter investigates two repeat-formatted other-initiated repair practices in Mandarin conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis (CA), this study will show that the two Mandarin repair initiations under examination, like other-initiation of repair in English, serve not only to initiate repair but also as vehicles for accomplishing additional negatively valenced actions, such as displaying a stance of disbelief or nonalignment.