A Formal and Functional Analysis of Repetition in Daily Conversation

Repetition is fairly salient in daily conversation, which simply refers to say the same thing twice. It occurs in all languages, not only in how a particular discourse is created, but also in how discourse itself is created. The current study is to examine the issue how repetition is used in conversation by native English speakers based on the Switchboard Dialogue Act (SwDA) Corpus, proposing a new classification of repetition with reference to various cases observed. Results show that in daily conversation native speakers more likely repeat their own utterances than what has been addressed by others. Moreover, they primarily repeat their own words of formulaic expressions, but when mimicking others they prefer semantically charged elements. Furthermore, exact repetition is prominent in interjections and formulaic expressions, while for semantically charged repetition, various forms (exact, partial and modified repetition) are not balanced between self-repeat and mimicking others. Thus, it is expected that this kind of information could contribute to automatic detection of functions performed by repeated utterances and facilitate the construction of dialogue system.