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In the second case, when the young woman is speaking to her boyfriend, the following sort of pattern of grammatical features is indicative of another sort of social language: Exclamation “What an ass ”; informal
vocabulary “ass,” ‘‘guy”; right dislocation “her boyfriend”; attention to hearer “you know”; directly making claims with no mitigators or attention to self as claimer. This social language contains cues or clues for solidarity,
informality, participatory communication, attention to shared values, and a focus on the social world and not the self.
Such patterns are part and parcel of what we called “grammar two” in Chapter 2 p. 29. Interpreters listeners or readers who are members of the Discourses whose social languages these are recognize however unconsciously
the patterns in the same rapid and intuitive way they recognize the situated meanings of words.
5.6 Units and transcription
With ever more sophisticated recording and computer equipment, it is possible to get incredibly detailed records of speech that include small pauses, slight hesitations, subtle changes in sound, pitch, rate, and loudness, as well as
close synchronizations of overlaps between speakers see Edwards and Lampert 1993; Schiffrin 1994: Appendix 2. It is tempting to believe that such detailed records represent some pure, objective, and unanalyzed “reality.” In fact,
they do no such thing. Speech always has far more detail in it than any recording or transcription system could ever capture or that the human ear can hear.
A discourse analysis is based on the details of speech and gaze and gesture and action or writing that are arguably deemed relevant in the situation and that are relevant to the arguments the analyst is attempting to make. A
discourse analysis is not based on all the physical features present, not even all those that might, in some conceivable context, be meaningful, or might be meaningful in analyses with different purposes. Such judgments of
relevance what goes into a transcript and what does not are ultimately theoretical judgments, that is, based on the analyst’s theories of how language, situations, and interactions work in general and in the specific situation being
analyzed Mishler 1991; Ochs 1979. In this sense, a transcript is a theoretical entity. It does not stand outside an analysis, but, rather, is part of it.
Any speech data can be transcribed in more or less detailed ways such that we get a continuum of possible transcripts ranging from very detailed what linguists call “narrow” transcripts to much less detailed what
linguists call “broad” ones. While it is certainly wise to begin one’s analysis by transcribing for more detail than may in the end be relevant, ultimately it is the purposes of the analyst that determine how narrow or broad the
transcript must be. The validity of an analysis is not a matter of how detailed one’s transcript is. It is a matter of how the transcript works together
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with all the other elements of the analysis to create a “trustworthy” analysis for which, see Section 5.8 on p. 94. There is not space here to go into the linguistic details of transcripts for details, see Edwards and Lampert 1993;
Schiffrin 1994: Appendix 2. Instead, I will simply give one example of how “minor” details can take on “major” importance in interaction, and, thus, must, in those instances, be included in transcripts. Consider the interaction
below between a Anglo-American female researcher ‘‘
R
” and a fourth grade African-American girl “
S
” for student with whom the researcher is discussing light as part of a school science education project. This student
comes from a very poor home and her schooling has been continuously disrupted by having to move in order to find housing. The researcher is about to start an interaction with the student in which the student will be asked to reason
about light by manipulating and thinking about a light box and how a light beam focused by the box interacts with different plastic shapes, including a prism which causes the light to break into a rainbow of colors.
The following transcript uses notational devices to name features of speech which we have not yet discussed, but which we will discuss in Chapter 6. For now, it is enough to know that each line of the transcript represents a tone
unit, that is a set of words said with one uniform intonational contour that is, said as if they “go together” – see Chapter 6. A double slash “” indicates that the tone unit is said with a “final contour,” that is, a rising or falling
pitch of the voice that sounds “final,” as if a piece of information is “closed off” and “finished” the fall or rise in pitch is realized over the underlined words and any words that follow them, see Brazil, Coulthard, and Johns 1980
for many more details. A tone unit that has no double slash is said on a “non-final contour,” a shorter rising or falling contour that sounds as if there is more information to come.
I have organized the text below into “stanzas,” a language unit that we will discuss in Chapter 6. Stanzas are “clumps” of tone units that deal with a unitary topic or perspective, and which appear from various linguistic
details to have been planned together. In this case, the stanzas are interactively produced. Words that are underlined carry the major stress in their tone unit as we will see in Chapter 6, stress in English is marked by
bumping or gliding the pitch of the voice up or down or increasing loudness or both. Capitalized words are emphatic said with extra stress. Two periods “..” indicates a hearable pause. Two dots following a vowel
“die:d” indicate that the vowel is elongated drawn out. “Low pitch” means that the preceding unit was said on overall low pitch. This transcript is certainly nowhere as narrow as it could be, though it includes some degree of
linguistic detail.
Stanza 1
1
R
:Where does the light come from 2
R
:when it’s outside?
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Stanza 2
Stanza 3
Start of Stanza 4
interaction continues After a long interaction from which this bit is taken, the researcher felt that the child often strayed from the topic
and was difficult to understand. However, it can be argued, from the above data, that the researcher “co- constructed” contributed to these topic changes and lack of understanding.
Children in school are used to a distinctive school activity in which an adult asks them a question to which the adult already knows the answer, but to which the answer is not supposed to be obvious, the child answers, and the
adults responds in some way that can be taken as evaluating whether the child’s answer was “acceptable” or not Sinclair and Coulthard 1975.
There is also a common and related practice in schools in which the teacher asks one or more obvious and rather “everyday” questions in order to elicit items that will subsequently be treated in much more abstract ways than they
typically are in “everyday’’ lifeworld interaction Keith Stenning, personal communication. A science teacher might ask “What is this?” of a ruler. Receiving the answer “a ruler,” she might ask “What do we do with rulers?”
Having elicited an answer like “measure things,” the teacher may very well go on to treat measuring devices and measurement in quite abstract ways. In the interaction above, the researcher appears to want to elicit some everyday
information about light in order to subsequently get the child to treat light in terms of abstract notions like “light sources,” “directions,” “reflection,” and “refraction,” that is, much more abstractly than specific things like the sun.
There is ample evidence from what we otherwise know about the student being discussed 3
S
: Sun low pitch 4
R
:From the sun low pitch .. hum
5
S
: Cause the sun comes up 6
S
: REALLY early 7
R
:um .. And that’s when we get light low pitch
8
S
: And that’s how the, the the me .. my .. me and my class 9
S
: is talkin’ about dinosau:rs 10
S
: and how they die:d 11
S
: And we found out .. 12
S
: some things . about how they die:d 13
R
:Oh really
14
R
: Does that have to do with LIGHT?
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here that she is, in all likelihood, unfamiliar with and unpracticed in this sort of on the face of it rather odd school-based practice.
In the above interaction, the researcher starts with a question to which the student responds with the word “sun” said on a low pitch and with a final falling contour. This way of answering indicates in many dialects of English
that the respondent takes the answer to be obvious this already constitutes a problem with the question–answer- evaluation activity.
The researcher’s response is said in exactly the same way as the child’s low pitch, final falling contour – and in just the position that a student is liable to expect an evaluation – indicating that she, too, takes the answer to be
obvious. The student might well be mystified, then, as to why the question was asked.
In lines 5 and 6 the student adds tone units that are said on a higher pitch than the previous ones. Furthermore, line 6 contains an emphatic “really.” This way of saying lines 5 and 6 indicates that the student takes this information to
be new or significant information. She may well have added this information in a search for some response that would render the initial question something other than a request for obvious information and in a search for some
more energetic response from the researcher, one that would let the student know she was “on the right track” in the interaction.
However, the student once again gets a response from the researcher low pitch, falling final contour that indicates the researcher takes the student’s contribution, again, to be obvious. The student, then, in line 8, launches off on yet
another contribution that is, once again, said in a way that indicates she is trying to state new or significant information that will draw a response of interest from the researcher.
The student also uses a technique that is common to some African-American children Gee 1985. She states background information first before stating her main topic light, though her “found outsome things” clearly
implies, in this context, that these things will have to do with light which they do – she has studied how a meteor blocked out sunlight and helped destroy the dinosaurs. The researcher, listening for a more foregrounded
connection to light, stops the student and, with emphasis on ‘‘light,” clearly indicates that she is skeptical that the student’s contribution is going to be about light, a skepticism that is, from the student’s perspective, not only
unmerited, but actually surprising and a bit insulting as subsequent interaction shows.
Here the “devil” is, indeed, in the details: aspects of the school-based “known question–answer–evaluation” activity, different assumptions about how information is introduced and connected, as well as details of pitch and emphasis
as well as a good many other such details all work together to lead to misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is quite consequential when the adult authority figure attributes the misunderstanding
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to the student and not to the details of language and diversity most certainly including the researcher’s own language and diversity.
One may wonder why the researcher asked the questions she did and responded as she did. To make a long story short, the research project was based on the idea that giving children too much explicit information or overt
challenging responses would restrict their creativity and “sense making,” especially with minority students who may not interpret such overt instruction and challenging the same way the instructor does. Ironically, a situation set up to
elicit the “best” from the child by leaving her as “free’’ as possible, led to her being construed as not making sense, when, in fact, she was making sense at several levels in a deeply paradoxical setting created by the researchers.
Note, then, how the details of the transcript are rendered relevant in the analysis and how the transcript is as detailed as it needs to be, no more, no less other details in the transcript could well have been brought into the
analysis. Of course, it is always open to a critic to claim that details we have left out are relevant. But some details will always have to be left out e.g. should we mark just how much vowels are adapted to final consonants? just how
much pitch declines across a tone unit? and, thus, such a criticism cannot mean that we must attempt to put in all the details. The burden simply falls on the critic to show that details we have left out are relevant by adding them in
and changing the analysis thus, discourse analysts must always be willing to share their data.
5.7 An “ideal” discourse analysis
