Convince you that Discourse Transcription is useful and important for representing language use as it is employed in conversations, narratives, and other everyday and culturally significant speech events.
Introduce you basic tenets of Discourse Transcription
Discuss Transcription Delicacy
Practice segmenting Intonation Units
Download the video file of your choice in the Google Drive ELAN folder, create a new ELAN transcription file and segment 1 minute of the language.
Why transcribe?
Imagine
Imagine that you’ve just recorded a beautiful conversation between two expert speakers of a language. They shared stories of the past, told jokes, and shared some of their feelings on how their language is changing. The conversation was natural, the recording quality is the best you’ve achieved so far. You then edit the video and audio together and create an ELAN file and your ready to transcribe the file.
Imagine
Then the questions flood in:
How do you segment the recording?
You start by segmenting clauses, but you find that it’s difficult because they’re not producing full clauses.
How do you transcribe laughter?
What about pauses?
You try to transcribe in IPA, but that is taking way too long. How do I make sure to capture all the details?
One of the speaker’s is using a special affect in his voice when telling jokes. How do mark that?
What did you experience?
What were some of the questions that came up in relation to the files you just worked on?
Okay, transcription is great, but what might be some problems associated with it?
What do we need in a transcription system?
Discourse transcription is one important and overlooked type of transcription in language documentation.
“Another level of transcription pertains to the creation of a written representation of recordings of more or less natural communicative events (everyday conversations, narratives, interactive games, speeches, etc.). The written representation typically provides the basis for the further analysis of such events.” (p. 33)
Discourse transcription is rarely discussed and rarely employed in language documentation projects.
“Unfortunately, neither the theoretical concerns nor the practical guidelines developed in these traditions (e.g. Du Bois et al. 1992, Selting et al. 2009) have had a major impact on practices in field linguistics and language documentation.” (p. 34)
Discourse transcription is rarely discussed and rarely employed in language documentation projects.
“… despite the fact that discourse transcription is at the core of documentary linguistic activity, it remains a topic that is rarely discussed in the field. Consequently, there is little agreement about very fundamental decisions such as how to segment spoken language (cp. Himmelmann 2006 for a short overview of the main issues).” (p. 34)
What’s the problem with this?
Rarely any discussion of transcription conventions used.
“More often than not, segmentation units above the word (i.e. prosodic units and/or syntactic phrases) are not explicitly discussed or justified, and are thus difficult to reconstruct and evaluate for users of a documentation. To make discourse transcription a major topic in the field, then, is one aspect of meeting the transcription challenge in language documentation.”
What’s the problem with this?
Rarely any discussion of transcription conventions used.
“The segmentation of continuous spoken discourse at levels higher than the orthographic word is rarely, if ever explicitly, addressed in descriptive linguistics. That is, it usually remains a mystery as to how exactly the author(s) arrived at the format of a transcript published in a text collection or in the appendix of a grammar.”
Wait what!?! Let’s change this!!
Discourse Transcription (DT)
Du Bois et al. (1992)
(aka UCSB-style transcription)
Transcription experiment
What are the influences led to DT?
Wally Chafe
information flow
the importance of hesitation
IU as the fundamental unit
Sacks, Schegloff, etc.
Conversation Analysis
Overlap
Pause
Turn Taking
etc.
What is DT?
A way of representing a speech event in writing for the purpose of analysis.
“Discourse transcription can be defined as the process of creating a representation in writing of a speech event, in such a way as to make it accessible to discourse research.”
What is the goal of DT?
To represent in writing aspects of the speech event that are significant to participants, whether or not they are consciously aware of it or not.
“The goal of discourse transcription … is to represent in writing those aspects of a given speech event … which carry functional significance to the participants – whether these are linguistic, paralinguistic, or nonlinguistic – in a form that is accessible to analysis.”
How does one go about doing DT?
Listen/watch for
Classify
Interpret
Notate … meaningful discourse features
“The transcriber must learn to listen/watch for, classify, interpret, and notate the discourse features that are deemed significant.”
“The discourse transcriber seeks to write down what is significant to users of language, and for this must draw on a knowledge of the language transcribed, as well as of the culture that goes with it.”
What are meaningful discourse features? Meaningful to whom?
The features that participants employ/attend to in their interactions.
“One tries to record those cues which the interlocutors themselves attend to and make use of, in their process of monitoring and participating in the ongoing spoken interaction.” (emphasis mine)
What exactly do we transcribe?
Everything?
“The task is not … to produce a record of all the acoustic or physical (articulatory) events represented on a tape.”
“Deciding what to transcribe, and what not to transcribe, is important not only for economizing effort, but also for focusing on fruitful research questions and the means required to answer them.”
Are all projects that employ DT uniform?
No!!!
“This is the reason … that there will always be more than one way to transcribe spoken discourse: any transcription system will reflect its users’ perspective and goals” (Ochs 1979).
Delicacy
Delicacy concerns the amount of informational detail about discourse phenomena … that is represented in a given transcription.
When delicacy is low, it is a broad transcription which contains few details about the discourse.
When delicacy is high, it is a narrower transcription which contains many details about the discourse.
Learning DT
Our learning will be incremental over the next three weeks: