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This chapter focuses on insights of conversation analysis (CA) that have been useful to designers of interactive technology. Insights into the organization and control of dialogue are provided by at least eight different disciplines. Complex interactions exist between the insights offered by each discipline, such that any individual piece of work is likely to combine insights from several sources. The function of repair in conversation appears to facilitate mutual understanding between participants. The turn-by-turn organization of conversation is such that participants must repeatedly exhibit their own understanding of prior utterances, especially when those utterances expect some direct response, as with adjacency pairs. The fact that repair itself is subject to the same kind of monitoring means that mutual misunderstanding can almost always be resolved to allow the conversation to proceed. Thus …