Repair in Verb-initial Languages
摘要
The phenomenon of repair has not been well researched, although it is pervasive in daily conversation. Fox, Hayashi & Jasperson's (1996) pioneering work on repair in English and Japanese has shown that languages with different syntactic structures organize repair in different ways. Speakers of English, which has a rigid S-V-O word order, use much clausal recycling, while recycling in Japanese, a verb-final language with loosely-organized constituents, is only made locally at a constituent-initial position or at the trouble source. However, this study on the repair phenomenon in Tsou and Cebuano, both predicate-initial Austronesian languages in Taiwan and in the Philippines, respectively, as well as the later studies on repair in Bikol (Fincke 1998) and Indonesian (Wouk 2004), has shown that both word order and rigidity/looseness of this word order are not the only factors that organize repair. We propose that constituent structure is a more important factor that is responsible for the organization of repair in languages.