Üleküsimine, ümbersõnastamine ja mittemõistmine infotelefonikõnedes
Clarifi cation, reformulation and non-understanding in phone conversations

Summary/Abstract: There are 126 dialogues from the Estonian dialogue corpus under investigation in the present paper. In 60 of these, there are one or many clarifi cations, reformulations, non-understandings or other (unclassifi ed) dialogue acts, a total of 121 partner-initiated repairs. Clarifi cations appear 72 times, reformulations 25 times and non-understandings 21 times. Each type of partner-initiated repair has a set of features which makes us possible to compare them against each other. Many of these features are specifi c to information telephone calls. Thus, for example, clarifi cation of numbers is very typical to information dialogues. Also, there are certain patterns in which way a number is spoken by information provider and how the client expresses his/her understanding in it. At the same time, reformulation of numbers happens very rarely. Instead, it is usually connected with conversion of information coming from clients to representation used by a database. Examples of such information are institutional name/general name and address/location. Non-understanding is used to indicate which part of information is understood and which part is not. In the analysed dialogues, telephone numbers, institutional names or general names introduce most non-understandings. There are certain languge structures which are used to make up clarifi cation, reformulation and non-understanding repairs. Hence it can be said that even though a human speech communication is very spontaneous and hard to predict, factors like institutional speech, information dialogue and telephone call put people into roles which introduce a strong impact on the fl ow their communication. Moreover, certain patterns appear to inform a partner about problems of communication.

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