Thank You,
Interactional Linguist
Presented by The
Third Autonomous
Bilborough
Linguistics Circle
Er, well, and kinda; rising intonation, micropause, and overlap. Where would we be without Interactional Linguists? Here’s what A and B said when we asked them.
| 1 | A | well (.) I | / er |
| 2 | B | | / have y- I mean you, y’knoːw |
| 3 | A | it’s (1.0) budawanna ge- |
| 4 | B | eːːh |
| 1 | A | well (.) I | / er |
| 2 | B | | / have y- |
| 3 | | I mean you, y’knoːw |
| 4 | A | it’s (1.0) budawanna ge- |
| 5 | B | eːːh |
Pretty clear, huh! If you’re tired of neat, easily analysable data that fits into well-defined categories—like Mandarin Chinese and X-bar, for example—maybe you need to give yourself and your career a boost by listening to real speech and trying to say something about it other than “a broad topic appears to be identifiable.” That’s right: if theory isn’t quite for you, just get out a tape-recorder and hoover up a couple of ladies gossiping in the post office or your kids arguing over the TV channels. Write it up, tot up the number of times A interrupts B, and bingo, you’ve got a paper.
But it’s not just atheoreticality we’ve got Interactional Linguists to thank for. We’re all familiar with the extraversion/introversion divide in linguistics: generative syntacticians are happy (insofar as they allow themselves to be) in their office all day putting subscript js next to nominals in Warlpiri while pragmaticists are chatting away with the Film Studies guy in the corridor. Well, Interactional Linguists lead the way in bridging this personality divide that so often leaves linguistics divided on tribal grounds: on Monday morning you see them dashing off with a tape recorder to capture someone breaking up with his girlfriend or a migrant worker trying to get a refund for an unused bus ticket on the phone, while on Monday afternoon they’re locked away in the office producing 72 pages of transcript for a conversation that lasted two minutes. That’s versatility, friends!
Not least among the issues that the Interactional Linguist raises is that of the transcript. There’s challenge enough in simply dealing with different lengths of vowel sound or measuring micropauses accurately. But the real joy, greater than which there can be little more satisfying in the world of linguistics, is agonising over how to represent, using only the resources of the Latin alphabet, overlapping cackles and giggles in a transcript of five teenagers talking about boyfriends, or a deep groan of dismay from a conversation recorded at a doctor’s surgery. But it’s real stuff, guys. Real language from real people—and we need to take it real seriously.
Thank You, Interactional Linguist.
