ORANGES AND PEACHES - UNDERSTANDING COMMUNICATION ACCIDENTS IN THE REFERENCE INTERVIEW

Librarians often have brief communication accidents in attempting to u nderstand reference questions as they ale initially presented, In this linguistic analysis, examples obtained largely from self-reports by l ibrarians were analyzed for evidence of phonological, syntactic, seman tic, and pragmatic anomalies. These ''ill-formed queries'' were classi fied into four main categories: (1) ''no-harm-done'' examples (usually caused by acoustic failures); (2) unrecognized librarian-originated a ccidents (usually involving pronunciation variants or homophones); (3) secondhand communication accidents (where the user repeats an earlier misunderstanding; and (4) creative reconstruction (where the user rec onstructs the meaning of a forgotten term). The results may assist lib rarians in understanding the linguistic reasons for common input failu res and in learning communication strategies designed to avert or repa ir such accidents. Specific interview techniques are recommended: rest atement, open or neutral questions, and follow-up questions. This stud y is part of a larger investigation in which discourse analysis is use d to examine ill-formed queries for evidence of library users' mental models of information systems.