Syntactic study of self-repair and self-reformulation in French and Spanish: Effects of utterance length

In this article we propose a study of self-repair and self-reformulation based on the analysis of a corpus of nearly 19,000 tokens, fully segmented into utterances. This corpus includes two languages, French and Spanish, which are equally represented, and five different communicative contexts (sociolinguistic interview, public interview, work meeting, meeting between friends and service interaction) for each of these two languages. This corpus architecture, as well as the segmentation of the entire corpus into utterances, allows us to point out some general trends, not previously described, regarding the effect of unit length on self-repair. Indeed, the average length in tokens of the utterance not only predicts the proportion of units with at least one self-repair, but also models the site of initiation of self-repair and type: if less than 10 % of utterances with 5 tokens or less have self-repair, almost 40 % of utterances with between 11 and 20 tokens have self-repair, and about 70 % of utterances with more than 31 tokens have self-repair. Moreover, in utterances with 5 tokens or less, self-repair is most likely to be without reformulation and to occur in a unit without a predicate, whereas in utterances with more than 11 tokens self-repair is likely to be with or without reformulation and to be initiated after the predicate, towards the middle of the unit.