Alternatives and Definitions: Two Practices for Repairing Lexical Items in Spanish Interdialectal Conversations

This paper examines how speakers of dialectally diverse varieties of Spanish man- age lexical items that emerge as trouble sources in interaction. Drawing upon a col- lection of other-initiated repair sequences and self-reformulations, the analysis re- veals two main practices for repairing a lexical trouble source: (1) providing an alternative referring expression or (2) offering a definition of its meaning. When participants provide an alternative, they orient to an equivalence in meaning, while distinguishing the equivalents based on their normative status (e.g., standard or di- alectal). When speakers employ definitions, they aim to secure mutual understand- ing by resorting to the general, lexical meaning of the trouble source. At times, participants contest the repair initiation or negotiate the normative status of the lex- ical item, showing how they locally negotiate the boundaries of their respective dialects and hold each other accountable for interdialectal understanding. The data are drawn from naturally occurring conversations among Spanish speakers in Ger- many.