ABSTRACT
Within any form of verbal communication there is the potential for trouble based on difficulty formulating what one wants to say, hearing what another said, and/or understanding what one heard. Because of such potential problems, participants in talk-in-interaction constantly monitor understanding by a variety of methods, such as asking questions and reading facial expressions (for example, a frown may suggest confusion). This chapter concerns one set of practices called repair that helps participants deal with such problems. I will begin by summarizing repair in conversation and then in storytelling in conversation and institutional talk. I will then examine a few instances of “errors” identified in the study of oral traditions in order to draw some general conclusions about how repair operates in the institutional talk of oral traditions. We will see that, because of the institutional setting of oral traditions, repair occurs less often but is nevertheless a possibility.
