Other correction and repair as distinct domains in talk-in-interaction

ABSTRACT Described in several interactional settings, most notably the classroom (Garcez, 2006; McHoul, 1990), the action of correcting someone has received attention from conversation analysts particularly within the study of the systematics of repair (Schegloff et al., 1977), where it was treated by many authors as a repair subtype. Doubts about and challenges to the pertinence of understanding other-correction in the domain of repair (Cheng, 2014; Hall, 2007; Macbeth, 2004) have motivated us to resume previous work (Garcez & Loder, 2005) and revisit the phenomena here. In this retrospective, after a survey of relevant research, we analyze two excerpts of interaction in Brazilian Portuguese (one from classroom talk-in-interaction, one from ordinary conversation) to underscore the distinctive interactive work performed by participants when doing repair (within the foundational systematics designed to address and solve problems of intersubjectivity) and other-correction (a dispreferred first action to expose unequal epistemic stances). We thus adopt the position that, even though they may operate successively in one same sequence, these are actions in different organizational domains.