Improvisational Signing in Sign Language Interaction: Through the Lens of Repair Sequence

Abstract

Everyone has had the experience of not being able to find the right word or expression to convey something in his or her thoughts. In this paper, we rely on analyses of an excerpt of a signed interaction to consider how signers solve this problem. In typical interactions, whether signed or spoken, if one encounters difficulty in expressing a thought during an ongoing interaction, he/she tends to temporarily halt the current sequence, move to a separate sequence to address the problem, and then return to the main sequence once the problem is solved. The segment that occurs within the interrupted main sequence is called the ‘repair segment’ in Conversation Analysis (CA). In this paper, based on the premise that repair segments occur in signed interactions as well as in spoken ones, we point out that signers solve word-finding problems in a manner that is specific to signing, through what we call ‘improvisational signing’. We analyzed SMU-annotated data within the framework of the repair sequence as provided by CA. As a result of these analyses, we identified ways in which signers try to combine their native vocabulary in sign language with a non-native component to represent the target object.