Sidestepping Grammar

Abstract

The notion of colligation (Jefferson 1988) refers to ways in which participants focus on a troublesource (or troublesources) of another speaker in the talk without explicitly ‘doing correcting’. Interactants may be seen to be ‘tying together a wrong item and the item which puts it right, such that the wrong item is added to by the right item, rather than discarded and replaced’ (Jefferson 1988: 6). This notion finds resonance in the work on exposed and embedded correction (Jefferson 1987). In this regard, Jefferson (1987) observes that recipients of other-correction sometimes accept or incorporate a correction into their own utterance or turn at talk, and at other times reject it.

Condensed versions of this chapter were presented as a paper at the convention of the National Communication Association in New Orleans, LA, USA (2002) and at a seminar of the British Association for Applied Linguistics/Cambridge University Press, ‘Conversation Analysis and Applied Linguistics’ (2002). I thank the participants at each conference for their comments, in particular, Gene Lerner who served as discussant of the paper presented at the National Communication Association. An excerpt of this chapter was presented as a paper at a panel on Other Repair in Second Language Talk at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (2002). I thank Catherine Brouwer, Gitte Rasmussen and Johannes Wagner, who organized the panel, and Gail Jefferson, who served as discussant.