Conversational repair in spoken Hong Kong Cantonese

This paper examines the process and mechanism of conversational repair in spoken Hong Kong Cantonese. Levelt calls for accounts of conversational repair from diverse languages; this paper helps test his supposition that “the organization of repair is quite invariant across languages and cultures” (1989: 497). The paper also raises the hypothesis that personal and contextual factors are crucial variables which determine which type of repair will be socially acceptable (and therefore prominent) in a particular conversational setting.