Multiple Sayings as a Resource for Halting a Course of Action in Interaction: Evidence from Turkish Everyday Discourse

Self-repetition, which is defined as repeating one’s own utterance, performs various functions in spoken discourse. This study investigates the use of “multiple sayings”, a specific type of self-repetition which involves the speaker’s repetition of some unit of talk in the same turn multiple times, under a single intonational contour. In everyday discourse different linguistic resources are used as multiple sayings performing different communicative functions. The study limits itself in two aspects: (i) the use of lexical multiple sayings such as “yes yes yes” and “wait wait wait”; (ii) their function of halting the prevailing course of action in talk-in interaction. Although repetitions have been investigated in Turkish in several studies, this specific form of repetition and this specific function remains to be explored. To this end, using Conversation Analysis as the method of analysis, the study aims to find out what multiple sayings are used in Turkish everyday discourse for halting a course of action and what courses of action they halt. The database of the study consists of the recordings of a 10-hour Turkish everyday discourse. The analysis of the data reveals that in line with the previous studies conducted in other languages, Turkish speakers use multiple sayings to stop an unwarranted course of action, which implicates the universality of this function.