Tone and intonation in discourse management - How do speakers of Standard Vietnamese initiate a repair?

•Other-initiations of repair in Vietnamese are predominantly marked with a final rise.•This rise may be analysed as a phonetic reflex of a high boundary tone.•There is partial or complete overlap between the high boundary tone and lexical tones.

This paper investigates the intonation of other-initiation of repair in Standard Vietnamese and provides an analysis of its interaction with lexical tone at the word level. Results from both single-word and multi-word utterances show that speakers make predominant use of a rising pitch contour to mark other-initiation of repair, a contour that has been found in a large number of languages. This rise occurs consistently at the right edge of utterances and may be analysed as a phonetic reflex of a high boundary tone that can overlap, partially or completely, with the lexical tone of an utterance-final word. Further, the study demonstrates the application of talk-in-interaction to the study of the relation between lexical tone and intonation in tone languages.