Detailed analysis shows that the workings of repair is closely related to turn management as provided by the turn-taking system on the one hand, and to the syntax of the linguistic material that makes up the turn constructional units on the other. Insofar as the turn-taking system provides a background against which the mechanism of repair operates, the vast majority of same-turn self-repairs found in the data points to a structural advantage for repair-initiations issued inside the turn constructional unit: they are issued before the possible completion point of the trouble-source turn where speaker change becomes relevant. Therefore whether a repair is initiated in the same turn at a transition relevance place or in the third turn relative to the trouble source is worked out locally. It is also found that while most other-initiations occur in the next turn after the trouble source turn, as a turn, an other-initiation may start a little "early" before the trouble source turn has reached its possible completion point. However, in such cases, an other-initiation still occurs after the trouble source has been produced. The positions for an other-initiation to cut into the trouble-source turn in progress include the completion point of a turn unit which projects extended talk, or the completion point of an initial component of a compound turn unit. Given that such positions are also found to be taken up by other types of recipient talk (e.g. continuers [Schegloff, 1982] and collaborative completions [Lerner, 1991]), other-initiations occurring at these positions are nevertheless accounted for within the turn-taking system. 

The Chinese data also show that repair and syntax are closely related. It is found while there do not seem to be syntactic constraints on the occurrence of the trouble source, a backward trajectory of same-turn self-repair often displays sensitivity to the syntactic structure of the turn constructional unit. For instance, a repeat of the utterance prior to the trouble source in the repair segment typically goes back to a word boundary, which may coincide with a phrasal boundary. This suggests that repairs in the Chinese data tend to be accomplished in the local phrase containing the trouble source. This tendency is further confirmed by an inspection of repairs initiated inside the verb constructions, which reveals phrasal-internal positions where the backward trajectory tends to return to. 

The present study provides fresh data for the existing body of work on repair and adds to our understanding of how repair is sequentially organised in languages other than American English. The provision of naturally occurring Chinese conversational data also contributes to conversation analytic researches into interactions conducted in Chinese.