Katherine Walker - Identifying units in spoken discourse through Interaction Management strategies

There are various claims in the literature about the relationship between Interaction Management strategies (often labelled repair or disfluency phenomena) and units of discourse identified by other means (e.g. morphological/phonological words/phrases). For instance, Levelt (1983) finds that cut-off tends to occur early in the word, and Allwood et al. (1990) find that lengthening tends to occur at the end of a word. Following an interruption, rather than resuming word- or phrase-medially, speakers/signers tend to recycle pre-interruption elements in order to resume at the beginning of a word or phrase (Woodbury 2003; Fox et al. 2010; Fox et al. 2017: 650). But the strength of these tendencies varies according to certain typological characteristics: a preference for phrase-initial resumption may be stronger in languages with prepositions rather than postpositions, and the tendency to avoid word-medial resumption may be weaker in polysynthetic languages (cf. Paschen 2025). Using data from spoken-language corpora, this talk explores such claims about the systematic use of (particular) Interaction Management strategies at the same kinds of junctures across different kinds of languages.