ABSTRACT
My original interest in the talk of confused speakers arose from my own ordinary member understanding that what people says sounds simple but usually turns out to be complex. I had always been interested in why talk goes wrong. Right at the beginning of this research I was actually investigating entirely another subject, the collective history of housing cooperatives as told by members. After conducting a number of interviews, in the lengthy process of transcribing I found I kept returning to confusions in the talk-how people did not understand my questions or how I did not understand their answers and how that was apparent in the talk. And then I got involved in how repair took place and how the talk got tangled up and then untangled. By this time I came to the conclusion that my real interests were actually how confusion is manifest in talk! So my first forays in the direction of confused talk arose out of talk between normal speakers.
