A corpus-based study of self-repairs in Russian spoken monologuesКорпусное исследование самоисправлений говорящего в русской устной монологической речи

The paper investigates self-initiated self-repairs in the Prosodically Annotated Corpus of Spoken Russian (PrACS-Russ), a unique resource where spontaneous speech phenomena (speech errors, repairs, filled pauses etc.) in Russian natural discourse are systematically registered in transcripts synchronized to audio recordings. Based on a qualitative and a preliminary quantitative analysis of more than 800 repairs, two main strategies of self-repairing are identified and described: the ‘on-line strategy’ associated with speech disfluencies that break the lexical, grammatical or prosodic coherence of the produced discourse, e.g. with truncating the segment under repair, and the ‘off-line strategy’ that does not entail disfluency integrating repairs into fluent planned speech production. Our analysis shows that self-repairs appear with overall rates of 1.8–2.9 instances per 100 words. On-line repairs vastly outnumber off-line repairs: they comprise 82 % to 90 % of the total number of repairs in the analyzed subcorpora of PrACS-Russ. In the absolute majority (83–91 %) of repairs, the segment under repair and its corrected counterpart are structurally and semantically isomorphic, i.e. show systematic parallelism in their meaning, grammatical form, syntactic function or even in their phonetic shell (as, e.g. in ‘slips of the tongue’ cases). Main types of isomorphism between the segment under repair and its corrected counterpart are identified and investigated in the paper.