Makoto Hayashi is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Geoffrey Raymond is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jack Sidnell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

• 1. Conversational repair and human understanding: an introduction Makoto Hayashi, Geoffrey Raymond and Jack Sidnell; 2. Ten operations in self-initiated, same-turn repair Emanuel A. Schegloff; 3. Self-repair and action construction Paul Drew, Traci Walker and Richard Ogden; 4. On the place of hesitating in delicate formulations: a turn constructional infrastructure for collaborative indiscretion Gene H. Lerner; 5. One question after another: same-turn-repair in the formation of yes/no type initiating actions Geoffrey Raymond and John Heritage; 6. On the interactional import of self-repair in the courtroom Tanya Romaniuk and Susan Ehrlich; 7. Defensive mechanisms: I-mean prefaced utterances in complaint and other conversational sequences Douglas W. Maynard; 8. Availability as a trouble source in directive-response sequences Mardi Kidwell; 9. Epistemics, action formation, and other-initiation of repair: the case of partial questioning repeats Jeffrey D. Robinson; 10. Proffering insertable elements: a study of other-initiated repair in Japanese Makoto Hayashi and Kaoru Hayano; 11. Alternative, subsequent descriptions Jack Sidnell and Rebecca Barnes; 12. Huh? What? - A first survey in 21 languages N. J. Enfield, Mark Dingemanse, Julija Baranova, Joe Blythe, Penelope Brown, Tyko Dirksmeyer, Paul Drew, Simeon Floyd, Sonja Gipper, Rósa Gísladóttir, Gertie Hoymann, Kobin H. Kendrick, Stephen C. Levinson, Lilla Magyari, Elizabeth Manrique, Giovanni Rossi, Lila San Roque and Francisco Torreira.

'Repair is absolutely central to any analysis of language and social life as self-organizing natural systems. Here, major scholars insightfully demonstrate repair's relevance to action formation, human understanding and language diversity. A central resource!' Charles Goodwin, University of California, Los Angeles