Chapter 3 - Codifying Patterns of Interaction

Summary

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.