24 - Listening to Talk-in-Interaction: Ways of Observing Speech

Summary

This chapter describes ways to approach the phonetic analysis of talk-in-interaction. It starts off with a brief overview of some of the general issues. These include how we go about observing and transcribing. These are practices common to Conversation Analysis and phonetics, and the discussion aims to bridge different disciplinary norms. The chapter also presents a phonetically informed approach to analysing speech in data sessions. The main part of the chapter works through a short fragment of data line by line, showing how conversational data can be approached from a phonetic perspective while adopting a CA approach to analysis, and connecting the reader to wider concerns that have been addressed in the literature. The topics covered include sequential organisation, including turn beginnings and ends; speech timing across turns, including an illustration of rhythmicity; discussion of intonation and its functions in conversation; the relationship between phonetic design and social action; ways of building a collection of examples for analysis.