On self-repair in Spanish. A qualitative analysis using CORLEC

Abstract

Since self-repair represents a phenomenon that has not been investigated for native speakers of Spanish in interactive contexts, this study is an attempt to approach the different forms of self-repair in this Romance language. The theoretical basis are the studies by Cohen (1966) for the different types of speech errors that lead to self-repair, Levelt (1983) for the different forms of repair, and Schegloff et al. (1977) for the different phases of repair organisation. The data to be qualitatively analysed are retrieved from the corpus CORLEC. The study shows that the different forms of repair are more easily to be detected than the different types of speech error. The reason is that the influences of an earlier segment or of a following one are sometimes not clear. Additionally, the influences on the troublesome item are not always phonological in nature but cognitively motivated.