Pre-emptive Repair of Potential Misunderstandings: Prospective Procedures for Managing Intersubjectivity and Steering Social Action

Abstract

In social interaction, participants face a pervasive problem: recipients might not only misinterpret what speakers are saying and doing, but they might act on those misinterpretations. A practical challenge for speakers is thus how to prevent misunderstandings that may lead to inapposite conduct. In this study, we bring prior interactional research together with new data from a range of social settings, to focus on the pre-emptive repair of potential misunderstandings as a resource in interaction. This type of repair can be distinguished from speakers’ self-corrections of their own speaking difficulties, as well as from speakers’ repairs of misunderstandings that recipients have already displayed. When speakers engage in pre-emptive repair—expanding their turns in prospective positions to address how they should not and/or should be understood—they orient to interpretive troubles that might relevantly emerge and the potential for these troubles to affect future action. By heading off potential misunderstandings before they can manifest in recipient behavior, speakers work anticipatorily to “steer” recipients toward more apposite conduct. The analysis offers empirical insight into how members of society use context-specific sensemaking practices and concrete conversational resources to shape interpretive landscapes in the service of intersubjectivity and social action.