Abstract
This is a qualitative study of the types of segmental repair that maintain mutual intelligibility in English-as-a-Lingua-Franca interactions among Chinese and Japanese speakers of English (Jenkins, 2000; Matsumoto 2011; O’Neal 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d, 2016, in press). Repair refers to a set of practices through which conversation participants stop the ongoing action to attend to actual or potential problems to the maintenance of mutual intelligibility (Schegloff, 2007; Németh, 2012). Although anything can potentially be a problem to the maintenance of mutual intelligibility, this study focuses only on instances of the repair of segmental phonemes so that the pronunciation remains mutually intelligible. Using conversation analytic methodology to examine a corpus of repair sequences concerning pronunciation among Chinese and Japanese students at a Japanese university, this study claims that three segmental repair strategies are used in the interactions to maintain mutually intelligible pronunciation: segmental phoneme modification, segmental phoneme insertion, and segmental phoneme deletion.
(Copyedited by Duncan Sidwell & Ding Yanren)
About the author
George O’NEAL is an associate professor of English at Niigata University in Japan. He is also a doctoral student in the Department of Education at Waseda University in Japan. His research focuses on applying conversation analytic principles to the study of phonology.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the peer reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The author would also like to thank Professor Kumiko Murata for her patience. Last, the author would like to thank Gareth Kay, Yan Yan, Zhan Xuan, Wan Jumani Fauzi, Zsuzsanna Németh, Paul McBride, Kazuo Fukuda, and Yumi Matsumoto for just being generally awesome and for proofreading help.
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Appendix
| Symbol | Indicates |
| = | a latched utterance in which no discernable gap exists between the utterances |
| : | lengthened sound |
| (.) | a silence of less than one tenth of a second |
| (0.2) | a timed silence (two tenths of a second) |
| ((word)) | a description of an extra-linguistic event |
| °word° | word said saliently more quietly than the surrounding words |
| $word$ | word said while giggling or laughing |
| <word> | word that is said saliently slower than the surrounding words |
| >word< | word that is said saliently faster than the surrounding words |
| word- | sudden cut off of speech |
| .hhh | breathing in |
| hahaha | laughter |
| ? | high rising intonation |
| , | slightly rising intonation |
| . | falling intonation |
| ↑ | high rising volume |
© 2016 FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy
