Denying, Qualifying, or Diverting with “meishier” in Open-Class Repair in Mandarin Chinese Talk

Abstract

When engaging in a conversation, interact ants frequently encounter problems of hearing, speaking and understanding. Under such circumstances repair is usually resorted to ensure the progressivity of the talk. With the methodology of Conversation Analysis, one specific repair procedure has been investigated in this paper which is open-class repair initiated by the recipient with “huh?” or “what?” followed by the speaker denying the existence of the previous action, qualifying or diverting the previous action in the trouble source turn (the turn with the problem) with “meishier”. And in these three situations “meishier” can be probably translated respectively into “nothing”, “nothing serious” and “I’m ok”. Therefore, this research would provide a profound knowledge about the actions conducted by “meishier” as well as a specific guidance to the translation of “meishier” into English.