Self-interpretation as a Conversational Strategy

Verbal interaction involves a continuous process of negotiation and renegotiation of the utterances’ meaning, depending on the participants’ goals. In this sense, one of the implicit goals of interaction is what can be called mutual understanding. One of the things that we do when we speak with each other is to create the possibility of an increasing coming-together – ideally until they become isomorphic – of what the speakers understand when they deal with each other’s utterances. Conversational interaction becomes thus reflexive and metadiscursive – speaking about elements of conversation itself in order to clarify them. This is the context in which the phenomenon of self-interpretation appears: the speaker’s return to something that they previously said, in order to reformulate their utterance based on a perceived misunderstanding by the addressee. The present study will offer an analysis of the forms and functions of self-interpretation in discourse.