Pre-emptive Repair of Potential Misunderstandings: Prospective Procedures for Managing Intersubjectivity and Steering Social Action

In social interaction, participants face a pervasive problem: recipients might not only misinterpret what speakers are saying and doing, but they might act on those misinterpretations. A practical challenge for speakers is thus how to prevent misunderstandings that may lead to inapposite conduct. In this study, we bring prior interactional research together with new data from a range of social settings, to focus on the pre-emptive repair of potential misunderstandings as a resource in interactio