Tape-recording Data

1. Tape-recording Data Deny A. Kwary Airlangga University www.kwary.net

2. Recorded data is suitable for: • First-language acquisition • Second-language acquisition • Sociolinguistics • Accent and dialect studies • Conversation analysis

3. Considerations in recording the data: • Places to get the data: your home, a programme on TV, a hotel, etc. • Audio for one informant; video for several informants. • Ethics and legality: • Ask their permission first, or ask them afterwards. • The quality of the recording

4. How much data do you need? • Conversation: The first five minutes. • Accent: a small quantity as long as the examples fill in the phoneme chart. • Dialect: a longer recording.

5. Transcribing speech: • Phonetic transcription: Using IPA and enclosed in square brackets. • Phonemic transcription: Using IPA and enclosed in slanted brackets. • Orthographic transcription: the conventional spelling system of the language.

6. Transcribing speech orthographically • Dealing with silence • Dealing with complexity • Dealing with obscurity • Dealing with volume

7. 1. Dealing with silence • Use dashes for tenths of seconds with a plus for the one that makes up a full second. • Give the duration numerically in brackets. • If you cannot time the pause, write a pause in double brackets if it occurs within a speaker’s turn, and gap within double brackets if it occurs between different speakers’ turns.

8. 2. Dealing with complexity • Where one person begins when someone else is already speaking, use a single opening square bracket before the new speaker’s words, aligned vertically with another at the appropriate point. A: so we didn’t have to [wait long B: [no we didn’t • If it is already the end of a line, but you want to show that the same speaker has continued, although someone intervened during the line, use the latching symbol.

9. 3. Dealing with obscurity • If it really is impossible to decipher the utterance: • Put empty brackets, or • Put ‘indecipherable’ in brackets, or • Put an asterisk for each indecipherable syllable. • If you can guess it, but you have some doubt about it, put your guess in brackets.

10. 4. Dealing with volume • Use capital letters to show loudness. • Use degree signs (superscript circles) on both sides of a quiet utterance.

11. Team Assignments: • Ask your friend who has an A in Speaking IV to pronounce several english words. Record and transcribe them phonetically. • Record a dialog on MetroTV. Transcribe it orthographically.