Documenting Conversation Toshihide Nakayama Documentary Linguistics Workshop 2016

Topics Why we want to look at conversation What is in conversation Challenges in collecting conversation Challenges in transcribing conversation 2

Why conversation? Most dominant form of language use in everyday life Important domain for language documentation and maintenance Good representation of the traditional “way of speaking” (communicative style) 3

Basic characteristics ConversationWritten language synchronousasynchronous onlineoffline spontaneousplanned more about social interaction more about content and structure 4

Conversation vs. Written lg. Goals and agenda are different Language is used differently Linguistic expressions are structured differently Utterances are organized differently 5

Conversation is a good place to see: Interactional strategies: how to display one’s stance (attitude) how to display one’s intention and action how to manipulate/maintain social relationship how to coordinate turn management how to negotiate shared understanding/coordinated action 6

Conversation is a good place to see: Formulaic expressions Greetings Discourse markers Everyday set phrases; formulaic expressions Social meaning of speaking 7

Conversation is NOT a good place to look for: Idealized pronunciations Fully specified clause structure Paradigms; structured alternations Complex constructions 8

Collecting Conversation 9

Challenges Extremely context-sensitive Hard to control: timing content flow, structure effect of the environment, including you 10

Common problems Uncomfortable having conversation in the heritage language especially when the language is not used on a daily basis Uncomfortable being recorded 11

Stickier problems Uncomfortable speaking the heritage language (especially in front of outsiders) Feeling against documenting the heritage language *Common where the language is viewed simply as a colloquial (and vulgar, low-prestige) variety of the dominant language 12

Stickier problems Value of recording conversation is not obvious to the speakers unlike vocabulary, traditional stories, songs etc. 13

Some workaround ideas Create a social event where speakers can gather and interact Work in a team consisting of members of diverse social profiles Involving community members Raise the awareness by working on the data together 14

Transcription 15

Challenges contracted speech overlaps false starts truncated sentences dynamic (unpredictable) development hesitation and repairs 16

Aargh! Is conversation full of garbage? 17

Remember Conversation is different from written language What we (linguists) are expecting to see in language is heavily influenced by written language 18

Writing down conversation Conversation: not organized by sentences We need to : use different units of representation 19

How to segment the stream Unit question Connected to purposes of analysis Complete idea? Predication (containing a predicate)? Speaker turn? Intonational completion? Discourse chunk (paragraph)? Event chunk (episode)? 20

Writing down conversation Conversation: contains ‘distorted’ and ‘imperfect’ forms We need to : worry about ways to represent uttered forms 21

How to represent words orthography vs. pronunciation because, ‘cause cuz[kəz] easyhardharder less accuratemore accuratemost accurate neutral possibly stigmatizing; possibly confusing neutral computer- friendly computer- unfriendly 22

Value of computer- friendliness Principle of computational tractability Similar instances be encoded in predictably similar ways Systematic and predictable encoding will facilitate: Searching Reformatting / Repurposing of the data 23

Writing down conversation Conversation: not perfectly linear Overlaps; interruptions We need to : have ways to represent nonlinear developments 24

Writing down conversation Conversation: full of non-structural cues Intonation, voice quality, non-linguistic vocal expressions, pauses We need to : have ways to represent non- structural features 25

Some resources Univ. of California, Santa Barbara Discourse transcription convention Top page on/representing on/representing Basic symbols for discourse transcription on/A02asymbols.pdf on/A02asymbols.pdf 26