Transcript Analysis

The conversation that was written into transcript form was between my mum and dad and used various different techniques that all transcripts use. My mum begins all four conversations that i recorded and wrote about, she also talks the most within these conversations and asks most of the questions. This is because within these conversations at this time she has more power and seems to be in more of the dominant position. However, in this transcript they do use exchange structure as they both speak after each other and take turns, even though they interrupt each other a few times this shows they are eager to talk to one another. There are many times where adjacency pairs are used this is when questions are asked and are answered by the next speaker, in my transcript this was used many times and the questions where mainly asked by my mum and only once by my dad, this can show a lot about the way the relationship works or what kind of person they are. But there was also one adjacency pair which is called a flouting adjacency pair, it is called this because it is a question that doesn't get an answer an action is just done. In my transcript my mum asks my sister to get something from the kitchen, there is no reply from my sister you just know by the further conversation that she did what she was asked. Both of my parents but mainly my dad use fillers a lot when they are talking in a general conversation to someone they are comfortable and generally informal with. Many of his sentences begin with "erm" this is used when someone doesn't know what to say or could be thinking about what they are going to say before they say it. Neither of them tend to use swearing much in general conversation but my dad used it once during the transcript showing the general use of language and that he is comfortable talking that way with the other person in the conversation. All of these were used to show the relationship between the two speakers, what they are like in they way that they talk to one another in general conversation and what roles they take regarding on the one who takes more control in a conversation.

Grammar notes

Grammar is a set of structural rules that is in control of the way that language works, there are three parts or aspects of grammar which are word classes, syntax and morphology.
Word classes are the roles that a word would play in a sentence.
Syntax is the set of rules that control where each word class can appear in a sentence.
Morphology describes the building blocks of individual words.

There are eight main word classes:
nouns which are naming words such as the name of a person, place or thing.

adjectives which describe nouns so what the person or thing looks like or is like.

verbs which are doing words telling you to do something like jump.

adverbs which describe verbs like the word incredibly.

pronouns which take the place of nouns such as you, they, him or me.

conjunctions are connecting words that connect sentences for example and, or, but, because.

prepositions which define relationships between words in terms of time space or direction.

and finally determiners which give specific kinds of info about the nouns like a, the, two, his.

Word classes can take different positions in a sentence but there are rules about how they go and work with one another. it is straight forward for when a sentence doesn't make sense the order is wrong. Grammar rules effect word formation, (morphology) because extra parts sometimes has to be added to words to change things like number or tense. the extra parts are called inflections.
 Tense: events that happen in the past are usually described in past tense, sometimes however in both spoken or written discourse, past events are described using present tense forms. There is a clear sense that time has passed since the even happened, you can tell this by the words that are used.
Plurals: by using plurals in a sentence it can increase the scale of the scene or what is happening,
Adjectives: they are a good way to influence and persuade your target audience as they can be exaggerated especially combining plurals and adjectives.

Goffman

Goffman:
Face- Face is the public self-image that every adult tries to protect. Goffman wrote about face in conjunction with how people interact in day to day life. He decided that everyone is concerned, to some extent, with how others act towards them. We act socially, choosing to create this identity that others see and know us to have. This identity, self-image, is what we show when we interact among others socially. To lose face is to publicly change our self-image. Maintaining face is achieved by taking a line while interacting socially. A line is what the person says and does during that interaction showing how the person has an understanding of the situation and the person's evaluation of the others he or she interacts with. Social interaction is a process joined by line and face.

Positive face is the wan or need to be liked, appreciated, approved by others.

Negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon, intruded, or otherwise put upon and not effected by others thoughts about you.

Grice

Grice:


Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United States.
Grice's work on the nature of meaning has influenced the philosophical study of semantics. His theory of implicature is among the most important and influential contributions to contemporary pragmatics.
Grice's most influential contribution to philosophy and linguistics is his theory of implicature, which he first began developing in his 1961,‘The Causal Theory of Perception', but which is most fully explored in his 1967 William James Lectures on "Logic and Conversation".
The basic idea here is that the meaning of a word or sentence results from a regularity in what speakers use the word or sentence to mean. Grice would give a much more detailed theory of timeless meaning in his sixth Logic and Conversation lecture.

Grices Maxims discovered and created four maxims:

Quantity - Use of appropriate amount of detail when speaking to someone with right amount of conversational linguistics. 
Quality- Being truthful and speaking only the truth with no reason to knowingly mislead, meaning no lying and speaking truthful at all times during a conversation.
Relevance- Keep what is being discussed relevant and according to the topic of conversation. No need of changing the subject mid-way through conversation.
Manner- Avoid vagueness when talking and being full of enthusiasm and energy.

William Labov

William Labov:
The methods he used to collect data for his study of the varieties of English spoken in New York City. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of African American Vernacular English were also influential: he argued that AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard, but respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules. He has also pursued research in referential indeterminacy, and he is noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.
More recently he has studied changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the United States today, and studied the origins and patterns of chain shifts of vowels, he and his co-authors find three major divergent chain shifts taking place today.
Labov was awarded the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science by the Franklin Institute with the citation "for establishing the cognitive basis of language variation and change through rigorous analysis of linguistic data, and for the study of non-standard dialects with significant social and cultural implications.