Investigating Intimate Discourse: Exploring the spoken interaction of families, couples and friends 9780415706322, 9780415706339, 9781315672113

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Investigating Intimate Discourse

Intimate discourse – that between couples, family and close friends in private, non-professional settings – lies at the heart of our everyday linguistic experience. It creates and sustains our closest relationships. Using an innovative blend of the community of practice model with a corpus linguistic methodology, Brian Clancy expertly reveals the patterns that characterise the shared linguistic repertoire of intimates. Corpus methods such as frequency and concordance are thoroughly introduced, exemplified and systematically employed in order to operationalise the concept of the community of practice in relation to intimate discourse. A half-million-word corpus of intimate data collected in various settings throughout Ireland provides the data for insights into patterns such as intimates’ use of pronouns, vocatives, taboo language and pragmatic markers. The intimate linguistic repertoire that emerges is shown to facilitate the delicate balance between our instinctive desire to be involved in the lives of those closest to us while at the same time recognising their need for privacy and non-imposition. Investigating Intimate Discourse will primarily be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working in the area, and to those working in related areas such as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Advanced undergraduates taking modules in those subjects will also find the book useful. Brian Clancy is a lecturer in academic writing and research methods at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He is co-author of Introducing Pragmatics in Use (Routledge, 2011).

The Routledge Domains of Discourse series features cutting edge research on specific areas and contexts of spoken language, bringing together the framework and tools for analysis of a discourse. As our understanding of spoken communication develops, corpus linguistics promises to provide the unifying link between previously compartmentalised areas of spoken language such as media discourse and language pedagogy. Designed to present research in a clear and accessible form for students and researchers or practitioners, each title in the series is developed around three strands: • • •

Content: each title focuses on the subject matter of a particular discourse, e.g. media or business Corpus: each title is based on a collection of relevant spoken texts in its domain of discourse Methodology: each title engages with a number of approaches in language and discourse analysis

Titles in the series Investigating Intimate Discourse Brian Clancy Investigating Workplace Discourse Almut Koester Investigating Classroom Discourse Steve Walsh Investigating Media Discourse Anne O’Keeffe The series editor Michael McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham (UK), Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Limerick, Ireland and Visiting Professor in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, and co-series editor of the Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides and the Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics series.

Investigating Intimate Discourse Exploring the spoken interaction of families, couples and friends Brian Clancy

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2016 Brian Clancy The right of Brian Clancy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clancy, Brian, 1975– author. Investigating intimate discourse / by Brian Clancy. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Interpersonal relations—Evaluation. 2. Interpersonal communication— Evaluation. 3. Discourse analysis—Social aspects. 4. Communication in families—Evaluation. 5. Discourse analysis—Social aspects. I. Title. P94.7.C53 2015 401′.41—dc23 2015017554 ISBN: 978-0-415-70632-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-70633-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-67211-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Book Now Ltd, London

For all those closest to me

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Transcription conventions

ix xiii xv

1

An overview of intimate discourse 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1 Characterising intimate discourse: Definitions and descriptions 2 1.2 ‘Intimate corpus linguistics’ 7 1.3 Glossary of frequently referred to corpora 10 1.4 Overview of the book 10

1

2

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 2.0 Introduction 15 2.1 Interaction analysis 16 2.2 Corpus analysis 27 2.3 The Limerick Corpus of Irish English 35 2.4 Conclusion 40

15

3

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 3.0 Introduction 47 3.1 The community of practice 49 3.2 Intimate discourse and the dimensions of a community of practice 50 3.3 A corpus linguistic approach to operationalising the community of practice 55 3.4 Conclusion 69

47

viii

Contents

4

The turn-taking repertoire of intimates 4.0 Introduction 75 4.1 Turn initial items 76 4.2 Turn final items 85 4.3 Co-constructed turn-taking 92 4.4 Conclusion 95

75

5

Interpersonal markers in intimate discourse I 5.0 Introduction 100 5.1 Pronouns 101 5.2 Vocatives 112 5.3 Conclusion 120

100

6

Interpersonal markers in intimate discourse II 6.0 Introduction 123 6.1 Pragmatic markers 124 6.2 General extenders 135 6.3 Conclusion 141

123

7

Analysing variation between the sites of intimate discourse 7.0 Introduction 146 7.1 Variation between the discourse of family and close friends 147 7.2 Taboo language 152 7.3 Deixis 157 7.4 Pragmatic markers 162 7.5 Conclusion 164

146

8

Conclusion 8.0 Introduction 167 8.1 Language patterns that characterise intimate discourse 168 8.2 Invoking the ‘everyday’, ‘mundane’ or ‘casual’ 170 8.3 This book raises further questions 171

167

Index

173

Illustrations

Tables 0.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3

Transcription conventions Ten most common noun collocates for intimate and friendly Glossary of frequently referred to corpora Features of a high involvement speech style Other features of a high involvement, intimate speech style CANCODE’s matrix of speech genres operationalised The top 25 most frequent words in LINT The 25 most frequent words in each of the five spoken discourse context-types in LCIE The top 20 keywords in LINT LINT keywords with transcription features and high frequency grammatical items removed Top 20 high frequency turn initial items and their number of occurrences Top 20 turn initial items and their number of occurrences in LINT Comparison of top 20 most frequent turn initial items across three corpora Top 20 turn final items and their number of occurrences in LINT Top 20 most frequent words across three spoken corpora The frequency of occurrence of personal pronouns across the three corpora Most frequent he and she 2-word clusters in LINT and the BNC Top 20 most frequent potential vocatives in the LINT corpus Most frequent items with the potential to function as pragmatic markers in LINT Comparison of frequency of potential pragmatic markers across three corpora Frequency counts for the most frequent adjunctives and disjunctives containing stuff and thing(s) in the LINT corpus compared to the BNC

xv 8 11 24 35 36 58 59 61 63 78 80 82 87 103 103 105 113 125 126 139

x 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Illustrations Top 20 most frequent items in the family and friends sub-corpora Top 20 most frequent items in the family and friends sub-corpora Top 20 keywords for the family and friends sub-corpora Occurrences of FUCK and SHIT across the family and friends sites

149 150 151 153

Figures 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Word cloud for intimate Word cloud for friendly Mapping creativity and discourse context-type Sample information from LCIE database Proportional data distribution in respect to context-types in LCIE Sample demographic information from LCIE database Proportional data distribution in LINT Dimensions of a community of practice Random sample of 25 concordance lines with no as the search (or node) item in LINT Sinclair’s (2003) seven-step procedure for analysing concordance lines Random sample of 25 concordance lines with no as the search item, resorted one item to the left (1L) Random sample of 20 concordance lines with night as the search item (sorted 1L) The ten most common collocates of night in LINT Random sample of 25 concordance lines with as the search item (sorted 1R) Random sample of 20 concordance lines with do you want as the search item (sorted 1R) Random sample of 25 concordance lines with as the search item (sorted 1L) Random sample of 25 concordance lines with he was as the search item (sorted 1R) Random sample of 25 concordance lines with she was as the search item (sorted 1R) Functional distribution of vocatives in LINT Random sample of 20 concordance lines with like as the search item (sorted 1L) The frequency distribution of now according to the different context-types in LCIE Frequency distribution of now in formal versus informal context-types in LCIE Random sample of 25 concordance lines with and stuff as the search item (sorted 1L)

9 9 31 37 38 38 40 51 64 65 66 68 69 78 84 87 106 108 115 129 132 132 136

Illustrations xi 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

Proportional data distribution in LINT Occurrences of FUCK across the family and friends sites Occurrences of SHIT across the family and friends sites Comparative frequency of personal pronouns across the family and friends sites Comparative frequency of today, tomorrow and yesterday across the family and friends sites Comparative frequency of items with potential to function as pragmatic markers across the family and friends sites

148 153 156 159 161 163

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Acknowledgements

Permissions The author and publisher would like to thank the following copyright holders for their permission to reproduce the following material: • • •

•

• • •

• • • • • •

Arrested Development  20th Century Fox Television. Elaine Vaughan, University of Limerick, for permission to use her Corpus of Meetings of English Language Teachers. Examples of usage taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) were obtained under the terms of the BNC End User Licence. Copyright in the individual texts cited resides with the original IPR holders. For information and licensing conditions relating to the BNC, please see the web site at http:// www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk. Excerpts from the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) are reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders at the University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College, Ireland. LCIE is a one-million-word spoken corpus of mostly casual conversations, created under the direction of Dr Fiona Farr, University of Limerick and Dr Anne O’Keeffe, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick Ireland. Family Guy  Fox Broadcasting Company. Friends  Warner Bros. Television. Prof. Hongyin Tao for permission to reproduce his data tables from: Tao, H., 2003. Turn initiators in spoken English: A corpus-based approach to interaction and grammar. In: P. Leistyna and C. Meyer (eds.), Corpus Analysis: Language structure and language use. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 187–208. Modern Family  20th Century Fox Television. Queer as Folk  Cowlip Productions. The Royle Family  Granada Television. South Park  Braniff. The Simpsons  20th Century Fox Television. This publication has made use of the LIBEL Corpus for both data and excerpts. The LIBEL Corpus is a half a million word computerised corpus of spoken academic English, made up of recordings from a variety of settings in

xiv

Acknowledgements academic institutions in Ireland. The LIBEL Corpus was built by Cambridge University Press and Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and it forms part of the Cambridge English Corpus. It provides insights into language use, and offers a resource to complement what is already known about English from other, non-corpus-based research. Sole copyright of the LIBEL Corpus resides with Cambridge University Press from whom all permission to reproduce material must be obtained.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Mike McCarthy for providing ongoing support and guidance while I was writing this book and for his detailed comments on my various drafts. To Anne O’Keeffe and Geraldine Brosnan for their support and patience. Thanks also to Anne and Fiona Farr for granting me access to LCIE; I’ll leave it alone for a while now. Thanks also go to Sophie Jaques, Laura Sandford and Louisa Semlyen at Routledge. To Elaine, for cleaning me up after I jump in puddles. As P.G. Woodhouse put it, without all your help and encouragement, this book would have been finished in half the time.

Transcription conventions

Table 0.1 Transcription conventions Symbol

Feature

[Couple assembling shelves]

Contextual information provided between square brackets where necessary. Speaker tag awarded in order of speaker’s appearance in conversation. Incomplete words. Marks the beginning of an unfinished sentence, repeat or false start. Marks the end of an unfinished sentence, repeat or false start. Used to mark the end of an interrupted utterance and the beginning of a resumed utterance. Marks the beginning of an overlap. Marks the end of an overlap. The actual overlapping utterance is given on the next line. The number in the overlap symbol corresponds to the overlapping speaker. Uncertain or unintelligible utterance where the number of syllables cannot be guessed. The number of unintelligible syllables can be guessed. Marks a guessed utterance. Marks the end of a guessed utterance. Marks the inclusion of extra linguistic information (e.g. laughing, coughing, any significant background noise). Marks the end of extra linguistic information. Inverted commas mark the beginning and end of where information is being read aloud or instances of direct speech. Marks that a speaker is spelling out a word.

, , , etc. =

+



, …



“…” Capitals with single spacing and no full stops

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1

An overview of intimate discourse

Cam: We didn’t say Grace, we said ‘on your marks, get set, go’. (Three Dinners, Modern Family, Season 5, Episode 13)

1.0 Introduction Intimate discourse – talk between couples, family and close friends – is an elemental part of our everyday spoken experience. For many of us, it is likely to be the most significant interaction to permeate our everyday lives. With those closest to us, our intimates, we laugh, we chat, we fight, we gossip, we bond. This book looks at spoken interaction between intimates. More specifically, it employs a corpus linguistic methodology in order to uncover the linguistic patterns that characterise our everyday engagement with those most familiar to us. Spoken interaction in our close personal relationships is so habitual for many of us that it is easy to forget its fundamental importance; moreover, much research has a propensity to use terms such as casual, mundane or banal to characterise our everyday spoken interactions in contrast to, say, interactions in an educational or workplace setting. Gubrium and Holstein, (1990: x) argue that the familiar is taken for granted, a point expanded on by Varenne (1992: 13) who points out that our immediate concerns in the intimate sphere such as cooking dinner, putting children to bed or assembling the ubiquitous ‘flat pack’ have been dismissed as ‘irrelevant to the business of life’. In addition, the fact that intimate discourse is so familiar to us all means opinions about it may be readily proffered and yet rarely informed or supported and certainly not with any consideration of systematic corpus evidence from the context-type itself. Therefore, the aim of this book is to take an empirical approach to the linguistic patterns that characterise the plethora of speaker relationships and groupings that populate the intimate corner of the arguably ‘casual’, but certainly not ‘mundane’ or ‘banal’, spoken interaction. We begin with a consideration of what it means to be linguistically intimate. There are a number of issues to be considered here in relation to a definition of intimacy; for example, how we linguistically represent that our relationships are intimate with one person but not with another or whether or not we decide for ourselves who our intimates are or whether these decisions are made for us.

2

An overview of intimate discourse

Our attention first turns to issues such as these and how they have been represented in the previous literature. We then take our first look at how a corpus methodology might help to shed light on our interactions with our closest conversational companions.

1.1 Characterising intimate discourse: Definitions and descriptions Intimate interaction takes place ‘backstage’, a dramaturgical metaphor Goffman (1959) employed to invoke an area where conversational participants are relaxed, informal and off-guard. This area is, according to Goffman (1959: 112), a place where ‘the performer can relax: he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character.’ He maintains that this backstage area has its own language symbolic of intimacy: The backstage language consists of reciprocal first-naming, co-operative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough informal dress, ‘sloppy’ sitting and standing posture, use of dialect or sub-standard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and ‘kidding’, inconsiderateness for the other in minor but potentially symbolic acts, minor physical self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching and flatulence. (Ibid.: 128) Backstage language of this kind has, invariably and traditionally, proven difficult for corpus linguists to access. This is not surprising for who would be anxious for their flatulence to be preserved on an audio and increasingly audio-visual, record? Indeed, family life is private and so it is difficult to access it. Add to this that spoken transcripts, the record of intimate discourse most commonly available to corpus linguists, are ‘messy’ in the intimate domain, characterised, as they are, by multi-party discourse that features frequent speaker overlap, interruption, repair, etc. However, problems such as these should not, and, indeed cannot, provide us with an excuse not to adequately attempt a detailed description of the typography of all instances of everyday, habitual spoken language. The beginning of the twentyfirst century is the perfect time to revisit notions of what constitutes intimate discourse, particularly when we consider that the structure of the traditional family unit, for example, is undergoing a period of significant and accelerated change. In addition, the Internet, an area that seemingly offered unlimited opportunity for the creation of intimate relationships, has become increasingly unappealing due to a surge in instances of trolling and shaming, coupled with a prevailing atmosphere of surveillance (Laing, 2015). Intimacy, as Turner and West (2006) point out, is very difficult to define and researchers, at least in the area of family communication, often avoid discussing the topic altogether. One of the reasons for this is the ambiguous terminology associated with intimate relationships. Words such as love, like, deep or close are

An overview of intimate discourse 3 commonly used when discussing these relationships but their meaning can prove difficult to pin down. Identifying intimate linguistic behaviour can also prove to be a difficult task. Goffman (1971: 190–191) maintains that ‘quite pleasant interaction is possible between passing strangers, and acrimony of the fiercest kind can characterise relationships of great intimacy.’ As Knapp and Vangelisti (2000) put it, ‘it is possible to know a lot about someone and still not like them.’ There are, however, a number of indicators of intimate behaviour that can be of assistance to us as we seek to unearth the wealth of linguistic patterns characteristic of our intimate relationships. In the past, intimate relationships were structured according to social convention such as family or kinship roles but in today’s society these structures and conventions have changed. We speak of our close friends as family, even though we are not related or tied by blood, and both opposite and same sex couples, even childless ones, now constitute families. Cheal (2008: 8) also points out co-habitation, as a pattern of family living, has emerged as a challenge to traditional marriage. Contemporary definitions of intimacy ‘are characterised by a dominant focus on the ethics of friendship, negotiation and disclosure’ (Gillies, 2003: 18). This focus on aspects such as negotiation has led to a focus on the quality of the connection between intimates (Gubrium and Holstein, 1990). This sense of connection that characterises intimate relationships enables us to address one of the bugbears of any definition of intimacy – the difference between ‘non-intimate’ and ‘intimate’, or ‘close’, friends. Spencer and Pahl’s (2006) notion of a ‘friendship repertoire’ indicates that people are comfortable with having both intimate and non-intimate friends. This repertoire ranges from ‘simple relationships based on activities, fun or favours, to more complex and intimate ties involving emotional support and trust’ (Pahl and Spencer, 2010: 4). This highlights the new-found focus on quality of connection within intimate relationships. Extract (1.1) illustrates intimates’ innate understanding of the nature of intimate or close friendship. The issue of surrogate mothers is discussed as it is a plotline in a soap opera that the participants have been watching.

(1.1) [Discussing the issue of surrogate mothers in the storyline of a soap opera]





That would kill me seeing someone else having my child. Ah no no no no no no. I had this conversation with my mother now. No no no no no. No if Sabrina couldn’t have kids or one of my friends or someone and they asked me to have their kid I’d have no problem having it for them. I wouldn’t have a problem doing it but I would have a problem with someone else having it. Imagine having your mother carrying your baby like. laughing My baby would be my sister like. laughing

4

An overview of intimate discourse

It can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. It depends on if you know the person or not. If you don’t you’ll never see them again and you can get on with it. Build up a relationship with your child. But you know if that person is your best friend you’re going to see them every day for the rest of your life. At the back of their heads they could be at the back of their heads “it’s my child”. But you can’t. It’s not your child. It’s not your egg. We can see that one of the attributes of being a best friend, according to speaker 3, is that you will see them every day for the rest of your life. As we will further discuss here, intimate speaker relationships are characterised by, amongst other things, frequent interaction over a long period of time. Both Knapp and Vangelisti (2000) and Turner and West (2006) refer to a number of communicative behaviours indicative of intimate relationships – declarations of commitment, positive absolute statements, private language, messages of comfort and support, playfulness, non-verbal intimacy and sexuality and self-disclosure. Two of these, non-verbal intimacy and sexuality, to which access to a shared physical space is essential, and self-disclosure are particularly important to characterising intimacy. Intimacy refers to the Latin ‘to make known’ and self-disclosure refers to personal matters that are not known to many people that have, obviously, been voluntarily provided. Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards (2011) point to mutual selfdisclosure as essential to our understanding of closeness in intimate relationships. Jamieson (1988) maintains that disclosure on an intimate’s part leads to knowledge of privileged information which in turn leads to a feeling of emotional closeness. She maintains that for emotional closeness to exist between people ‘they must sense they share a common view of the world and/or mutually benevolent views of one another’ (p. 8). According to Knapp and Vangelisti (2000), intimate selfdisclosure is open, cathartic, reciprocal and has negotiated boundaries. Intimate disclosure is, in the main, truthful, however, lies form an equally important part of a close relationship and the decision to lie to an intimate as an alternative to telling them the truth is something that characterises our everyday linguistic interactions. Take for example the scenario being discussed by the participants in Extract (1.2). In this extract, the participants are discussing a mother’s directness.

(1.2) [Discussing a mother’s directness] I said the minute I finish college now I’m going to get it done I’ve no money now so I can’t get it done. I know I know she said to me “it’s not very flattering you know” it’s just a big load of hair like that I thought “oh charming”. Thanks mum honesty is not the best policy. We just lie and say “oh it’s not bad”. Just tie it up there a it’ll look nice. Yeah.

An overview of intimate discourse 5 This is hardly surprising; Bochner (1984: 612) notes that ‘highly satisfied partners sometimes keep secrets, deceive each other, and even lie to avoid dysfunctional conflicts.’ We can see, in this extract at least, that truthful disclosure is not always a cathartic process for intimates and this may result in boundaries being overstepped. Intimate relationships are also characterised by regular interaction in a shared, non-professional physical space (McCarthy, 1998; Turner and West, 2006). As we will discuss throughout this book, and as our brief look at the work of Goffman (1959) in this chapter as already illustrated, patterns of linguistic intimacy are not exclusively verbal; in fact, we rely heavily on paralinguistic features such as rolling our eyes or shrugging our shoulders. Equally, Galvin and Bommel (2000) describe touch as the language of intimacy (see also Morgan, 1996). In order to participate in this paralinguistic system, intimates must share a physical space over a period of time. In Extract (1.3), speakers again demonstrate their inherent understanding of shared space characterising intimacy. Speaker 2, discussing a previous relationship that she had, thought this time six months ago that I’d be engaged by now. She also characterises her commitment to her ex-partner by saying I was living with him and everything.

(1.3) [Discussing a previous relationship]









When will you get engaged [name]? I’m not getting engaged I’m not getting married. I thought this time six months ago that I’d be engaged by now. Oh so terrible. No it’s not I’m going out more now than what I ever did going out with him we never went out I was living with him and everything. Oh fuck I heard you were living with him all right. I was. How long were you living together? Seven months everything was grand with us up until the night before we broke up. Are you serious what happened? He changed one night all of a sudden he started pulling me around the place lost the head with me and he never had a temper or anything. Everyone says no matter what age you are going with a man you are always going with a boy.

In this extract, in speaker 2’s use of I was living with him and everything, and everything is a general extender which, in addition to a set-marking function, has a range of pragmatic functions such as intensification (see Chapter 6). And everything has a possible set-marking function, indicating that living with someone is an exemplar of an intimate relationship. It also functions on a pragmatic level through foregrounding or ‘scaling up’ the preceding information

6

An overview of intimate discourse

(Levey, 2012: 259), perhaps indicating her surprise at the outcome of the relationship. As we have already mentioned, speaker 2 thought that it would be formalised in the shape of a wedding engagement. Speaker 1 then draws further attention to the importance of intimates sharing a physical space by asking How long were you living together? This request is designed to elicit an amount of time, which it does, seven months, which also demonstrates that intimacy is characterised by living together for a long period of time. We have already mentioned interacting over a period of time as a factor in establishing close friendship and here we see it in relation to the identity of a couple. This ‘mutual engagement’ is one of the dimensions that characterise Wenger’s (1998) concept of the community of practice, the theoretical framework we employ in this book. The fact that intimates interact with one another on a predominantly face-to-face basis over a long period of time means that linguistic practices, or ways of doing things, emerge from these particular relationships. For example, as illustrated by the quote from Modern Family that opens the chapter, different families develop different ways of doing things at the dinner table. On the other hand, some families may rarely sit down to eat at a dinner table. The idiosyncrasies of intimate relationships require intimates to continuously walk a series of ‘tightropes’ in order that their relationships are maintained. Partners find themselves having to balance involvement and privacy, revelation and restraint, disclosure and discretion, predictability and mystery (Bochner, 1984). Similarly, families seek to balance the tensions of ‘autonomy with connection, openness with protection and novelty with predictability’ (Turner and West, 2006: 102). Therefore, intimates find themselves engaged in a process of negotiation of these Janus-like tensions (Morgan, 1996). Turner and West (2006) note that this negotiation of closeness is one of the primary tasks facing the family and describe the process as ‘never ending’ (p. 221). However, because modern intimate relationships are characterised by negotiation, we can now form more fulfilling connections than before (Giddens, 1991 and 1992) and, therefore, we have come full circle to a point we made at the beginning of this section – that intimate relationships are characterised by quality of connection. Both Gubrium and Holstein (1990) and Morgan (1996) have emphasised the discursive nature of the family and the importance of contingent and negotiated interactive process to the construction and maintenance of family identity (Gillies, 2003). Morgan (1996) refers to these interactive processes as ‘family practices’ and here again we see a clear link between intimate relationships and the concept of community of practice. Negotiation is one of Wenger’s (1998) key components of joint enterprise, another of the dimensions of the community of practice model. Wenger (ibid.: 52) intends the term negotiation ‘to convey a flavour of continuous interaction, of gradual achievement, and of give-and-take.’ For Wenger the negotiation of meaning, or ‘our experience of everyday life’, comes from our engagement in practice (ibid.: 51–52). Therefore, our conceptualisation of intimacy must include an examination of the practices that intimates engage in. This book seeks to uncover the linguistic practices of intimates through

An overview of intimate discourse 7 the application of a corpus methodology and it is to corpus linguistics that our attention now briefly turns.

1.2 ‘Intimate corpus linguistics’ Throughout the book, we will be examining intimate discourse using a corpus methodology and it is useful to open our corpus discussion at this stage. In general, corpus analysis takes place a posteriori and, therefore, as corpus researchers, we do not have access to participants to request, for example, further background information or clarifications. In Chapter 2, we will discuss corpus design decisions that yielded the data that we will use to examine patterns of intimate language in use. As we will detail, the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) is characterised by a number of different spoken language context-types. The most informal of these are socialising and intimate. The socialising context-type is marked by friendship and characterised by a relationship between conversational participants that voluntarily come together for the purposes of conversation (cf. McCarthy, 1998). Therefore, we can see that both socialising and intimate discourse contain interaction between friends. One of the fundamental questions in relation to intimate discourse is how people differentiate between a ‘close friend’ and a ‘friend’ which allows for a differentiation in classification between intimate and socialising. We have already addressed this distinction briefly in relation to Spencer and Pahl’s (2006) concept of a ‘friendship repertoire’, and we revisit it now in connection to the issue of corpus design. From the researcher’s viewpoint, it is impossible to impose retrospectively the distinction between ‘close friend’ and ‘friend’. Therefore, and in order to avoid this, when the data for the LCIE was being collected, participants were asked to self-categorise the conversations they had collected as either intimate or socialising.1 All participants in a conversation had to identify their relationship to one another as intimate in order that their conversation might fall under this category (see Adolphs and Schmitt, 2004). This correlates with Wiemann and Krueger’s (1980: 56) assertion that ‘the best indications of the characteristics (or dimensions) of relationships are the respondents’ descriptions of their own relationships.’ A corpus linguistic methodology provides an alternative view and interpretation of the language patterns involved in intimate communities of practice. At this point, let us briefly analyse some corpus results for the word intimate in order to quickly showcase the range of outputs and views corpus tools can provide and how this might help us to perceive and interpret patterns. Using the concordancer WordSmith 5.0 (Scott, 2008), we have searched for occurrences of the word intimate in the British National Corpus (this process will be fully explained in Chapter 3) and contrasted it with the occurrences of friendly, an item in the same semantic set. This search yields a number of collocates – words that regularly appear in the company of one another – for both items which shed light on the meaning of intimate versus friendly. Table 1.1 presents the ten nouns that most commonly occur directly to the right of intimate and friendly in both the spoken and written components of the BNC.

8

An overview of intimate discourse

Table 1.1 Ten most common noun collocates for intimate and friendly intimate

friendly

knowledge relationship contact details connection relationships friend conversation friends atmosphere

societies atmosphere society relations way fire terms service hotel manner

Although, admittedly, a broad strokes approach, we can see some patterns emerging in relation to these items. For example, the only noun that occurs in both columns in Table 1.1 is atmosphere – it seems that an atmosphere can be both intimate and friendly. In relation to intimate, we can see that it collocates with both relationship and relationships. Also, we can see a number of collocates that can be associated with our discussion of the characteristics of intimate discourse. For example, intimate collocates with contact and connection perhaps emphasising the importance of the quality of the relationship between intimates. Interestingly, given that we problematised to some extent the notion of intimate and non-intimate friendship, both friend and friends occur as common collocates. We also discussed self-disclosure as a characteristic and this is represented by the presence of knowledge and details, implying familiarity with information that is very personal and private. As often happens in corpus linguistics, the uniqueness of one dataset is revealed when directly compared to another and Table 1.1 is no exception in this regard. The item friendly collocates with more ‘concrete’ notions such as a friendly society – as well as its wider reference to a society in general, ‘a friendly society’ is also a British financial organisation. Friendly also appears with relations, such as between countries, governments or populations, the more workplace oriented service and hotel and the militaristic fire. Therefore, intimate, in the main, appears to collocate with nouns characteristic of the strong relationships that exists in this context-type, whereas friendly is more widely employed beyond personal relationships into wider, more detached realms. A corpus can also be used to create word clouds such as in Figures 1.1 and 1.2. By using software such as Wordle (www.wordle.net), word clouds can also be used to investigate word frequency. Word clouds are, in essence, re-representations of frequency lists in graphical form which ensures that all items on the list can be seen together (see Chapter 3). The software converts word frequency into a visual representation with the importance of each word shown by an increase in font size and/or a change in colour. The font size of the words is proportional to its frequency, therefore, the larger words are more frequent than the smaller words. This allows us to quickly identify the most prominent words in a text

An overview of intimate discourse 9

told han dsexua1 three face01d house find terms woman local:::: . ht without found~ years great ~ ~form.... now ~ m1g need rather -~though~ woridem~ ~still"i§friends style part .a ne_ver togeth~~manydifferent·~con~ctknowledge~ SOCial even-. I~ publicawayllfe I area aQothermuchP~~!~i man ~e!Sewomen fri_!!ld gollttlesex people C'CI t kroom made=new~ 5 relationships~ must • === lr~ ~~r faeellso~ ~~. SDmething ~~~·IJttenrelatlonshlpJust :=small ii ~ II\ ek • rean almostlong ~ conv~rsation iS - ay DOWtlmethought J daYmarriage ....... feehngsmen God~ :a always give tWO _:glov~oM~un~feltw:~r~~~ook -i de~ai!S Charles- children make..,.gOOd t . . . knew..!!! ;: y talkWlthm light~ I k large ~see se .a~ ~ become kind DO came ...... ~ c::

1·

Figure 1.1 Word cloud for intimate

wenl0M:st look 11 H~ need last~ best often ~~ ·- away sm~ might :i :r: St"ll I · ht great:.:.....

~ ld ·c: 0 Dig different never run thing~ ~ ~ ~5 another nght· service set~~catowards ~E;'three ratherW3J .s.s -=~~-= ~ ~ c:»·- Ia :,e~ndi:P~Und==se:lgive get qui!PMr used back==-sPII' [Egave~ eo esomething~come.~ goodWe re·..... atmosphe • ........ cu help earsroomgso feel~enoughpart~place • sort tl• envnonmentanymucht· .s Y,acilitiesl nice know kfardays1 us e ~~~~really lmea somanma ~ thoughtalways s~:es:;C: "I8 little lifehotel ~ ~ even two ~tlhokutd fr!!_nds ~around bl ~ t::::.O = bar d ff :g oo e ... ::~ "' became ~ ava1 a e ~ home seemd en o er room - -~- -wor1dyear ..c:: camestaff U:. asked per fu II Iarge every food I~ng ~took day

II

~ erm

P.

k I

:5!

C'-t

c::;

Figure 1.2 Word cloud for friendly

(Friginal and Hardy, 2014). In order to generate these word clouds, we again generated concordance lines for intimate and friendly using the BNC and copied and pasted these into the ‘Create’ application in Wordle.2 The resulting word cloud presents a different visual representation of the items highlighted in Table 1.1. The search item intimate has been deleted from Figure 1.1 and friendly has been deleted from Figure 1.2. As we can see, in terms of size, items such as relationship(s), knowledge and contact previously identified in Table 1.1 are prominent. Also prominent here are life and time and we have discussed the relevance of time to intimate relationships. Less frequent, but prominent in the word cloud nonetheless, are items from the physical realm such as sex, sexual, and body and, perhaps as a result, marriage and children. In terms of friendly, the Wordle in Figure 1.2 again highlights atmosphere, although to a lesser extent than people or way.

10

An overview of intimate discourse

We again see the presence of words from ‘outside’ such as business, hotel, work and staff, for example. Also highlighted is the potential for friendly to be used in conjunction with nouns such as time, work or environmentally to form compound adjectives. There is, however, also some overlap between intimate and friendly which is to be expected. Figure 1.2 also features items such as family and children. Therefore, our brief first foray into corpus linguistics highlights its usefulness in identifying patterns associated with particular items. We have examined the use of intimate in everyday spoken and written language in comparison to the use of friendly and found evidence to support our assertion that everyday intimate relationships are indeed characterised by concepts such as negotiation, self-disclosure and consideration of the shared physical space. Throughout the book we will frequently be referring to a number of different corpora, therefore, at this point, before our outline of the content of the book we turn our attention toward a consideration of some of them.

1.3 Glossary of frequently referred to corpora Table 1.2 describes a number of corpora that we refer to throughout the book including the abbreviations by which they are more commonly referred to, their size and a short description together with where more information may be found either on-line or in print. More information about many of these corpora is also provided throughout the book.

1.4 Overview of the book The book is divided into eight chapters and, while it is envisaged that the book will be read as a whole, the chapters themselves can be read individually. This introductory chapter has primarily served to introduce the notion of what defines our relationships in the intimate sphere as opposed to our everyday interaction with acquaintances, work colleagues, neighbours, postmen, hairdressers, etc. The remaining chapters are more concerned with operationalising intimate communities of practice using a corpus linguistic methodology. In Chapter 2 we provide an overview of the previous research in the area of intimate discourse under two broad headings – interaction analysis and corpus analysis. We present these approaches as, at once, both distinct and complementary. Interaction analysis has long been at the centre of the study of intimate discourse, in particular in relation to family discourse, and has its roots in disciplines such as ethnography and conversation analysis. It is these qualitative roots that distinguish interaction analysis from corpus analysis given that contemporary corpus analysis has its origins in a broadly quantitative paradigm. Therefore, even when a corpus approach is taken by interaction analysts, they treat their corpus in a different way and, as a result, frequently unearth particular language patterns. This being said, we argue that there is considerable scope for, and benefit to, an approach that sees both interaction and corpus analysis as complementary. For example, corpus methodology and tools can provide interaction analysts with additional support for their findings while at the same time providing an alternate set of language patterns that are also

5 million 400+ million 500,000

CANCODE

COCA

COLT

The Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English The Corpus of Contemporary American English The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage English

1 million 1 million 500,000 4.6 million

LCIE

LIBEL CASE

LINT

SCOTS

The Limerick Corpus of Irish English The Limerick and Belfast Corpus of Academic Spoken English The Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech

1 million

ICE-Ireland

The International Corpus of English – Irish component

100 million

BNC

The British National Corpus

Size (words)

Abbreviation

Corpus

Table 1.2 Glossary of frequently referred to corpora

The corpus is made up of 90% written and 10% spoken texts. It is designed to represent a cross section of British English (see http://www.natcorp.ox. ac.uk/). CANCODE is an exclusively spoken corpus designed to be representative of British (and some Irish) English in different contexts of use (see McCarthy, 1998). COCA is a freely available corpus comprised of 20 million words each year from 1990–2012 across five genre types – spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers and academic journals (see http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). COLT, collected in the early 1990s, is the first large corpus collected that focuses on the speech of teenagers. It consists of the spoken language of 13–17 year olds in London (see http://clu.uni.no/icame/colt/). The ICE suite of corpora are designed for the comparative study of English worldwide. ICE-Ireland is comprised of 60% spoken and 40% written texts (see Kallen and Kirk, 2008). LCIE is a corpus collected in the Republic of Ireland, designed to represent spoken Irish English (see Farr et al., 2004). A corpus of spoken academic English, LIBEL CASE was collected in two universities on the island of Ireland; one university in the Republic and one in Northern Ireland (see Walsh et al., 2008). LINT is comprised of the data from the intimate context-type in LCIE. It features spoken interactions among couples, family and close friends. SCOTS consists of both written and spoken texts representing the languages of Scotland. Many of the spoken texts are accompanied by audio recordings (see http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/).

Description

12

An overview of intimate discourse

characteristic of intimate discourse. The second part of the chapter begins our discussion of the use of a corpus linguistic approach to explore intimate discourse. We examine the design and character of the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) and introduce the reader to the sub-corpus of LCIE, the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT), which provides the data that gives this book its methodological and analytical accent. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework that will enhance our understanding of intimate discourse. The community of practice model, first posited by Lave and Wenger (1991), emerged as a response to cognitive models of education and, therefore, does not, at first glance at least, appear to be ideally suited to the study of intimate discourse. However, if we consider that, in general, learning is part of our everyday conversational experience, then we begin to see how the community of practice and intimate discourse are a good ‘fit’. To wit, Chapter 3 seeks to reveal the linguistic forms that this ‘fit’ takes through the blend of corpus linguistics and the community of practice. We introduce the reader to a number of corpus tools – word frequency lists, keyword lists, concordancing and collocation – and illustrate the usefulness of these to the process of operationalising intimate communities of practice. It is in this chapter that we unearth the first linguistic patterns that we propose as emblematic of intimate discourse and which are more fully explored in the analysis chapters. What it means to apply the community of practice framework to intimate discourse is more fully realised in Chapters 4–7. Our investigation of the linguistic patterns that characterise intimate discourse begins with a nod to the long association of conversation analysis and intimate discourse. Chapter 4, therefore, utilises a blend of corpus linguistics and conversation analysis to explore aspects of the turntaking system of intimates in order to discover patterns that are characteristic of intimate communities of practice. To begin with, our focus is on turn initial items and we demonstrate how a corpus methodology can be used to identify a turntaking ‘fingerprint’ (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991) that is unique to a particular setting. We isolate a number of turn initial items that are more frequent between intimates than between, for example, colleagues in the workplace. Our attention then turns to the structurally less studied part of the turn as we analyse turn final items. These items are shown to have particular relevance to intimates’ interpersonal relationships. Finally, our chapter concludes with an examination of one of the most notable recent developments in pragmatics – that conversational participants view syntax as a shared resource and, therefore, view meaning in much the same light. Overall, the turn-taking system which characterises intimate discourse is seen to be unique in a number of respects, thus demonstrating intimates’ engagement in the joint enterprise of belonging to a particular community of practice. Chapters 5 and 6 move from structural, turn-related phenomena to an exploration of items which are characteristic of the pragmatic system of intimate communities of practice. In Chapter 5, we examine the shared repertoire of pronoun and vocative use in intimate communities of practice in order to explore the different roles that linguistic items play in the maintenance of group relationships and identity. For example, intimate communities of practice seem to be characterised by high frequency of use of the pronouns he and she which allows members

An overview of intimate discourse 13 to reinforce group solidarity by invoking shared knowledge in the form of people known to them. We also show how vocative function is equally distributed between the organisational and interpersonal spheres. In Chapter 6, we continue our journey through the interpersonal field through a consideration of traditional pragmatic markers such as like, you know and kind of/sort of and other pragmatic markers in the form of general extenders. The analysis presented in both of these chapters indicates that intimate communities of practice are not characterised by items that are traditionally associated with the establishment and/or maintenance of group solidarity but instead are ones that reflect the balance that intimates must strike between involvement and non-imposition. Chapter 7 takes a different approach to our consideration of intimate discourse by sub-dividing our intimate data into its constituent parts – couples, family and close friends. Therefore, instead of using a larger corpus and its accompanying tools to uncover shared linguistic patterns that we maintain are characteristic of intimate communities of practice in general, we instead treat the data as two distinct sub-corpora thereby allowing us to uncover patterns that we can say are characteristic of a family community of practice of a close friendship group community of practice. Through a focus on taboo language, empathetic deixis and pragmatic marking, we compare the shared linguistic repertoires of family and close friends. We conclude that both communities of practice are characterised by a high involvement style; however, in communities involving close friends, this style must be mitigated or softened, a trait not evidenced in the more direct style of the family community of practice. Finally, Chapter 8 returns to the key issues raised throughout the book and summarises the findings. Our tendency to use labels such as ‘everyday’, ‘mundane’ or ‘banal’ to describe our spoken interactions outside the more formal environments of the workplace or classroom is challenged, and, as is the norm, suggestions for further research are proffered.

Notes 1 This was, of course, the case only when the data was not being collected in more identifiable context-types such as the classroom or the workplace. 2 When copying concordance lines from WordSmith Tools Version 5.0 (Scott, 2008), in the ‘Choose Clipboard Format’ dialogue box, the number of characters wanted was set at 1000.

References Adolphs, S. and N. Schmitt, 2004. Vocabulary coverage according to spoken discourse context. In: P. Bougaards and B. Laufer (eds.), Vocabulary in a Second Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 39–49. Bochner, A., 1984. The function of human communication in interpersonal bonding. In: C. Arnold and J. Waite Bowers (eds.), Handbook of Rhetorical & Communication Theory. London: Allyn and Bacon, 544–621. Cheal, D., 2008. Families in Today’s World: A comparative approach. London: Routledge. Farr, F., B. Murphy and A. O’Keeffe, 2004. ‘The Limerick Corpus of Irish English: Design, description and application.’ Teanga, 21, 5–30. Friginal, E. and J. Hardy, 2014. Corpus-based Sociolinguistics: A guide for students. London: Routledge.

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Galvin, K. and B. Bommel, 2000. Family Communication: Cohesion and change. London: Longman. Giddens, A., 1991. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A., 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gillies, V., 2003. ‘Family and intimate relationships: A review of the sociological research.’ Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group Working Paper No. 2. London: South Bank University. Goffman, E., 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Goffman, E., 1971. Relations in Public. New York: Basic Books. Gubrium, J. and J. Holstein, 1990. What is Family? Mountview, CA: Mayfield. Heritage, J. and D. Greatbatch, 1991. On the institutional character of institutional talk: The case of news interviews. In: D. Boden and D.H. Zimmerman (eds.), Talk and Social Structure: Studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 93–137. Jamieson, L., 1988. Intimacy: Personal relationships in modern societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kallen, J. and J. Kirk, 2008. ICE-Ireland: A user’s guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. Knapp, M. and A. Vangelisti, 2000. Interpersonal Communication and Human Relationships. London: Pearson. Laing, O., 2015. ‘The future of loneliness’, The Guardian, 1 April, available on-line at: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/future-of-loneliness-internet-isolation (accessed 01.04.2015). Lave, J. and E. Wenger, 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levey, S., 2012. ‘General extenders and grammaticalisation: Insights from London preadolescents.’ Applied Linguistics, 33(3), 257–281. McCarthy, M., 1998. Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, D., 1996. Family Connections: An introduction to family studies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pahl, R. and L. Spencer, 2010. ‘Families, friends and personal communities: Changing models-in-the-mind.’ Journal of Family Theory & Review, 2, 197–210. Ribbens McCarthy, J. and R. Edwards, 2011. Key Concepts in Family Studies. London: Sage. Scott, M., 2008. WordSmith Tools. Version 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. Spencer, L. and R. Pahl, 2006. Rethinking Friendship: Hidden solidarities today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Three Dinners, Modern Family. Season 5, Episode 13. 20th Century Fox Television. USA, 22 January 2014, Fox Network. 22 minutes. Turner, L. and R. West, 2006. Perspectives on Family Communication. London: McGraw Hill. Varenne, H., 1992. Ambiguous Harmony: Family talk in America. Norwood: Ablex. Walsh, S., A. O’Keeffe and M. McCarthy, 2008. ‘…post-colonialism, multi-culturalism, structuralism, feminism, post-modernism and so on and so forth’: A comparative analysis of vague category markers in academic discourse. In: A. Ädel and R. Reppen (eds.), Corpora and Discourse: The challenges of different settings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 9–29. Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiemann, J. and D. Krueger, 1980. The language of relationships: I. Description. In: H. Giles, W.P. Robinson and P. Smith (eds.), Language: Social psychological perspectives. Oxford: Pergamon, 55–62.

2

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

Peter: I’ll handle it Lois. I read a book about this sort of thing once. Brian: Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn’t nothing? Peter: Oh yeah. (If I’m Dyin’ I’m Lyin’, Family Guy, Season 2, Episode 9)

2.0 Introduction Surveying previous studies of intimate discourse results in forays into disciplines as manifold as ethnography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, linguistics and cultural studies. In this chapter, we explore intimate discourse through a consideration of a number of these previous studies. In order to incor­ porate seminal research in the field and facilitate initial commentary, we have, very broadly, organised the studies under two headings – interaction analysis and corpus analysis. Our aim is to build on our discussion of what it means to be intimate by exploring the linguistic phenomena identified by researchers as char­ acteristic of intimate discourse. The first avenue of previous research, interaction analysis, is concerned with an exploration of the creation and interpretation of meaning, or, more fundamentally, the linguistic phenomena we use to under­ stand one another (Baker, 2010; Merrison et al., 2014). Interaction analysis is a generally qualitative approach to linguistic analysis, with roots in paradigms such as ethnography and conversation analysis. The second, corpus analysis, is an approach that also utilises qualitative research methods but, in addition, often endeavours to empirically account for linguistic patterning in spoken and written language. Corpora, principled collections of electronic texts that are stored in a computer, can be analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively using specially designed computer software. The linguistic focus of these interactional and corpus approaches is, admittedly, quite different. Studies in interaction analysis generally concentrate on the speech activity conversational participants are engaged in at any given time, i.e. ‘what they think they are doing at each point in the interaction’ (Tannen, 1992: 10), such as teasing or conflict sequences. This, as we will examine below, involves looking at the linguistic frame within which the interaction takes place. In contrast, corpus

16

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

linguistics involves the identification of linguistic patterns that characterise, or not, a particular dataset. Identifying speech activities such as teasing or conflict can be problematic for corpus researchers, especially when using computer software, as the software may not readily identify words or patterns specific to these activi­ ties unless they have been previously ‘tagged’ by the researcher (see Adolphs, 2008; Jautz, 2008; Rühlemann, 2010). However, because interaction analysis is so qualitative in nature, corpus linguistics can provide a complementary quantitative component such as frequency information (see Chapter 3) in relation to linguistic items which might be characteristic of these speech activities. Importantly, corpus linguistics provides researchers, especially those positioned within an anthropolo­ gical or ethnographic tradition, with large amounts of naturally­occurring data which enables ‘large­scale (even generalisable) comparisons to be made between different social groups, and revealing typical and atypical contexts and functions that various conversational phenomena appear in’ (Baker, 2010: 120).

2.1 Interaction analysis Studies in interaction analysis represent the cradle (if you can excuse the pun) of linguistic studies of intimate discourse, in particular studies of family discourse. A starting point for many linguistic researchers investigating talk amongst families and, indeed, couples and close friends, revolves around the work of Deborah Tannen and her contemporaries (see, for example, Tannen, 2001 and 2005; Tannen and Harness Goodwin, 2006; Tannen et al., 2007; Gordon, 2009). They employ an interactional sociolinguistic approach, an approach which, put simply, seeks to ‘interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communi­ cative practice’ (Gumperz, 2001: 215). Their work draws upon many aspects of linguistic research such as work in linguistic anthropology and the ethnogra­ phy of communication (Hymes, 1974; Gumperz, 1982), frame theory (Bateson, 1972; Goffman, 1974) and dimensions of power and solidarity (Tannen, 1994) and these will be more fully explored in this section. Another group of import to the study of family discourse is that centred around the work of Elinor Ochs (see, for example, Ochs and Taylor, 1992a and b; Ochs and Taylor, 1995; Ochs and Kremer­Sadlik, 2013a). These researchers integrate ethnographic perspec­ tives, for example those gleaned from visual documentation such as precise floor plans of a family’s house (Graesch, 2013), with a primarily conversation analytic approach. These approaches are further complemented by insights from disciplines such as psychology, for example, Repetti et al. (2013) measure the presence of stress hormones in parents’ saliva samples, and medical anthro­ pology such as Garro (2013) who examines attitudes to smoking and drinking in two different families. Both of these research groups place the family at the centre of their research. They have variously described family as the ‘crucible of culture’ (Ochs and Kremer­Sadlik, 2013b: 2), the ‘cradle of language … a touchstone for talk in other contexts’ (Kendall, 2007: 3), or ‘a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted’ (Tannen, 2007: xvii). Here, studies relating to both couples and friends, and illustrative extracts

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 17 from their conversations as contained in the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (see Section 2.3), have also been added where possible. 2.1.1 Frame theory Interaction analysis builds on Bateson’s (1972) and Goffman’s (1974) concept of a linguistic frame as a way of understanding participants’ interpretation of ongoing interaction. Bateson (1972) noted how monkeys they were able to dis­ tinguish between a playful bite and an aggressive one. This was due to something in the monkeys’ behaviour which established a play frame or a serious frame through the transmission of a series of metalinguistic or metacommunicative messages or signals. People also establish frames within which messages can be interpreted and conversation can proceed as intended through both verbal and non­verbal interaction (Goffman, 1974; Gumperz, 1982; Tannen and Wallat, 1993). Goffman (1974: 10) saw frames as ‘principles of organisation which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them.’ Tannen (2001: xviii) describes a frame as ‘an instruction sheet’ which tells us how to interpret the words, or message, we hear. Thus, as in, for example, teas­ ing behaviour, although the words may denote hostility, we can interpret them as playful (Straehle, 1993). In Extract (2.1), we see two female friends discussing the colours that a bedroom is to be painted.1

(2.1) Hmm so if you bought a colour for it you ca= they can look lovely you know . But with the pine bed you see the bed is pine right? Yeah. And then when he puts on that. Uh huh. There’s going to be a blue. Hmm. Like the colour of the walls. Right. On the drawers . Well how about if you got navy paint? Navy wood paint. And paint the drawers? The drawers and the+ . +and the wardrobe Andy and Claire did it with theirs as well it looked really nice I think they did white and put the drawers blue. Oh. It looked really nice you know.

18

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

The expression how about (in bold) traditionally frames offering a suggestion. It has been attributed to offering suggestions that are related to personal problems, in that the suggestion is aimed at improving the situation of one of the conversational participants (Adolphs, 2008). In the case of Extract (2.1), we see that speaker 1 suggests a solution to speaker 2’s dilemma involving the use of the colour blue on both the walls and furniture in her bedroom. Therefore, through the frame of suggestion, speaker 1 also positions herself as a ‘good friend’ to speaker 2 by providing a solution to a problem. However, it is not always possible to provide an explicit linguistic expres­ sion such as how about in order that a speaker may signal intent to other conversational participants. Therefore, in order to properly interpret what a speaker means, in addition to the actual words used, we must also rely on our background knowledge surrounding the context. Interaction analysis acknowl­ edges the ‘incomplete’ nature of spoken discourse. Instead of explicitly saying what we mean every time we speak, a process which would result in a series of frustratingly uncommunicative monologues, we can cue or signal conversational frames which Gumperz (1982) refers to as ‘contextualisation cues’. According to Gumperz (1982: 131): Roughly speaking, a contextualisation cue is any feature of linguistic form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presupposition. Such cues may have a number of such linguistic realisations depending on the historically given linguistic repertoire of the participants … some of the prosodic phenomena we have discussed as well as choice among lexical and syntactical options, formu­ laic expressions, conversational openings, closing and sequencing strategies can all have similar contextualising functions. Therefore, in addition to the verbal creation of frames through the use of expres­ sions such as how about, we can also cue frames using features such as prosody (pitch, rhythm, timing or intonation) and non­verbal cues (gaze, gesture, posture or facial expression). The context of interaction is essential to assigning meaning to these cues. If all participants understand and notice the relevant cues, conversa­ tion proceeds unproblematically. Conversely, a failure to recognise cues results in the intended frame not being established and, therefore, in miscommunication and misunderstanding. These misunderstandings are viewed attitudinally resulting in the miscommunication being interpreted as a social faux pas rather than a simple linguistic error (Gumperz, 1982). Gumperz (2001: 222) maintains that contextu­ alisation cues are learned primarily through contact with intimate groupings such as the family or friendship peer groups as ‘background knowledge is likely to be shared and speakers can be confident that others will understand their indirect allusions.’ This identification of intimate discourse as the source of the acquisition of these cues may, in part, explain a primary concentration on family discourse in the field of interaction analysis. Also crucial to our understanding of linguistic frames are linguistic registers (see Tannen and Wallat, 1993). Biber et al. (1999: 15) define register as language

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 19 use ‘relating to different circumstances and purposes’. Linguistic frames entail expectations about what type of register participants will use in their interactions. The influence of factors such as who we are talking to, where the conversation is taking place or the goal of said conversation, which, broadly speaking, equate to Hallidayan notions of tenor, mode and field (see Halliday, 1978), all influence the linguistic choices we make. In Extract (2.2) here, the mother (speaker 1) alternates between a caregiving frame where she supervises her younger son’s (speaker 2) use of a steam cleaner and a more conversational frame where she shares her own experiences of using the steam cleaner. She accompanies these moves between frames with subtle changes in register.

(2.2) [The family are using a steam cleaner. A ‘sockette’ is a cleaning cloth that is attached to the steam cleaner. ‘Trudy’ is the name of the family dog.]











It’s hard work now. I wipe it off with this then do I mam? Hm? I wipe off with this yoke? the dog. No you have to put on the sockette now and clean it. Oh right. It’s hard work like. I had to wash the sockette three times and dry it while I was cleaning the chairs. Do you want to do it yourself like? Well what are you doin now at the moment like? We’re just+ Steamin it up. +lifting the dirt I’d say. Jimmy will you get the sockette and do it the way she said. Otherwise I’ll do it because + She was doin that first to+ But you don’t do that. But you’ll you’re only wastin steam then.

The mother’s first use of you (marked in bold) in the utterance No you have to put on the sockette now and clean it creates a caregiving frame and positions the mother as ‘teacher’ (see Kendall, 2008) in that she is teaching her son how to use the steam cleaner. This position within the frame is accompanied by features of a more formal register such as specialised vocabulary, for example, sockette, and the use of have to which indicates an obligation that comes from the ‘outside’. Her utterance Jimmy will you get the sockette and do it the way she said contains a power­related imperative do it and again appears to invoke an outside authority in the shape of she (see Chapter 5 for more on she in intimate discourse). On the other hand, in a conversational frame, in order to provide support for her son’s endeavours, the mother uses devices connected to a more intimate, casual register

20

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

such as in her utterance It’s hard work like. I had to wash the sockette three times and dry it while I was cleaning the chairs. Here, the mother uses the first person pronoun I, informal grammatical devices such as the contraction it’s, pragmatic markers typical of intimate discourse such as like (see Chapter 6) and also invokes shared knowledge in the form of the chairs. Therefore, we can associate certain frames with subtle changes in the linguistic choices made by participants in the interaction. In relation to family discourse, Kendall (2006 and 2008) performed a framing analysis of parents at the dinner table with their children. Unsurprisingly, given that dinnertime is one of the few occasions where parents and children come together on a daily basis, dinnertime encounters have proven to be one of the richest sites for research into family discourse. Blum­Kulka (1994: 44–45) describes middle­ class family dinner talk as having a triple function: • • •

It is an arena for the negotiation of social power, where children learn the rules of interacting in multi­party discourse where variables such as age and intimacy matter; It helps in the development of both monologic and dialogic skills; Dinner table talk reveals what Blum­Kulka refers to as ‘culturally sensitive events’ through which children acquire culturally embedded ways of speaking.

The dinner table is, therefore, the site of both linguistic and cultural socialisation and an ‘ideal venue in which to take the pulse of the family’ (Dedaić, 2001: 375). However, we should note that dinner table talk differs across a range of different social parameters such as age, ethnicity and socio­economic status, although Ochs and Taylor (1992a and b) maintain that talking is as important as eating at meal­ time and that this talk is characterised by a high degree of problem­solving across diverse socio­economic backgrounds. Kendall (2006 and 2008) identified five frames linguistically created and main­ tained by one or both parents – dinner, caregiving, socialisation, managerial and conversational. In addition, she identified fifteen positions taken up by the parents within these frames. Kendall (2008) found that the mother takes up more posi­ tions at dinnertime than the father and also that these positions are more powerful ones. These positions are strongly linked with the creation of gendered parental identities within the family. For example, the mother occupies, almost exclu­ sively, a variety of positions, for example, Head Chef (responsible for preparing dinner), Planner (organising the child’s social life), Moral Guardian (judging the appropriateness of the child’s behaviour in the past) and Etiquette Monitor (responsible for enforcing bedtimes). This results in an identity of ‘nurturing dis­ ciplinarian’ for the mother of the family. Indeed, Much and Shweder (1978) refer to the notion of mothers as the ‘guardians of the social order’. On the other hand, the father, while occupying positions such as Journalist (showing interest in the child’s life by asking questions), primarily occupies the position of Comedian (making humorous remarks throughout dinner). Through his use of humour, the father both balances out the disciplinarian aspect of the mother’s positions and

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 21 also subverts the authority the mother has. Therefore, the father creates a more symmetrical power relationship between himself and the child. This results in a different identity of ‘rebellious comedian’ for the father. As we can see, the mother’s role in family affairs is a very powerful one – indeed, we often see it referred to in the research as ‘mother knows best’. This role is clearly represented in, for example, television shows such as The Simpsons and Family Guy where the father is often represented as inept – as is the case in Brian’s challenge of Peter’s knowledge in the opening excerpt. Early accounts of gender differences and amounts of talk found that men talk more than women in mixed­sex interaction in order to exploit their greater power and exert dominance and control over women (see James and Drakich, 1993). More recently, however, sociolinguists have acknowledged that the mother is the central figure in a family’s verbal and non­verbal interaction. Empirical studies have found that mothers frequently do the most talking in the family, especially at mealtimes. Tryggvason (2006) found that the mother was the most dominant speaker in the three cul­ tural groups in terms of utterances, turns and words produced. In each group, the father and target child contributed equally to the conversation.2 Similarly, De Geer and Tulviste (2002) found that Estonian and Swedish mothers dominate the floor when it comes to the overall amount of speech.3 Research has also shown that mothers dominate the use of particular linguistic strategies. To pre­empt what we will cover in Section 2.2, Ely et al. (1995) conducted a corpus study of middle­ class American families in order to generate a descriptive account of adults’ and children’s use of reported speech. They found that most families use reported speech during the course of dinnertime, however, this attention to ‘talk about talk’ is far more notable in the speech of mothers than of fathers or children. They asso­ ciate the greater attention paid to reported speech by the mother with the language socialisation processes – ‘in middle­class homes, where the mothers serve as the primary caretakers, it is not surprising that mothers talk more about talk’ (p. 217). As the primary caretaker, it seems that mothers use reported speech to encourage and support communication with their younger children. 2.1.2 Issues of power and solidarity In Extract 2.2, we see that the mother has to constantly maintain a balance between telling her son how to do something while at the same time maintaining their relationship. This balancing act between hierarchy and intimacy is a defining feature of family discourse and, according to Kendall (2006 and 2008) results in a number of parental frames critical to the understanding of family discourse (see also Tannen, 1989; Marinova, 2007). The need for parents to maintain this dual identity of both friend and parent when it comes to dealing with their children, results in unique situational characteristics in the family as parents perform, often simul­ taneously, subtle combinations of power and connection manoeuvres. Ochs and Taylor (1992a) believe that the power structure evident within family discourse appears to be a universal one: ‘such administration of power is characteristic of families everywhere and may occur whenever family members interact.’ They

22

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examined family narratives in the dinnertime talk of 100 middle­class, white, two­ parent American families. They describe the family as a political institution where members ‘review, judge, formulate codes of conduct, make decisions and impose sanctions that evaluate and impact the actions, conditions, thoughts and feelings of other members’ (p. 301). They point out that the construction of family narratives is a powerful medium for the on­going (re)construction of the political structure of the family with its inherent power differentials and contend that the most powerful positions of narrative introducer, ratified recipient and problematiser are occu­ pied by the parents. They found that introducers tend to be mothers, whereas the positions of ratified recipient and problematiser tend to be exercised primarily by fathers. Children most often occupy the less powerful roles such as protagonist and problematisee. However, they discovered that children are not resourceless in family narrative activity. They can at times resist the most persistent narrative interrogation and are adept at playing roles such as ‘wise guy’ or ‘con artist’ in order to escape their parents’ ‘continued narrative surveillance’ (p. 337). As we discussed in Chapter 1, intimate relationships such as close friends or couples are characterised by dimensions of power and solidarity in that intimates must delicately manoeuvre between the need for involvement and the need for non­imposition.4 This is again paradoxical in the sense that the maintenance of interpersonal relationships necessitates involvement yet this must be tempered through close adherence to the politeness norms of non­imposition that have been established. Politeness norms of non­imposition typically include strategies such as indirectness, deference, distance or indebtedness (Lakoff, 1975; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This need to simultaneously create both a sense of involvement and non­imposition is evident in Extract (2.3).

(2.3) Niamh would you by any chance have nail polish remover down in your room? I could have actually cause I don’t have any in Limerick + If you had it’d be brilliant . +and I did have a bottle some . Yeah and do you know when you’re comin if your happ= happen to find+ If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. +no if you happen to find some down there when you’re on the way back up would you Go in and you know the tray in yeah exactly there’s a tray + Get some cotton wool . Some cotton wool right I have cotton wool. +I think there’s cotton wool down there in that tray in the bathroom. This extract features three female friends chatting with one another. Although there is evidence of a high involvement speech style with features such as personal topics

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 23 and collaborative overlap (see Table 2.1), there is also evidence of non­imposition or considerateness strategies. For example, speaker 1’s use of would you by any chance is conventionally indirect (Brown and Levinson, 1987) as it provides speaker 4 with the necessary distance from imposition should she feel the need to say No. However, we also witness many episodes in intimate discourse where par­ ticipants are quite direct with one another and non­imposition can appear, on the surface at least, to be less evident. Take, for example, the following Extract (2.4) from family discourse.

(2.4) [[…] indicates that some speaker turns have been removed] Do you want some lemon meringue for dessert? I don’t know if I want any more. A cup of tea? Biscuit? There was other people in the car like if she was drunk. Will I put on the kettle? And why not? I’ll stick these into the dishwasher will I? […] Oh stop will you have a cup of tea? No thanks. Are you sure do you want a bag of taytos or something?5 No thanks. Are you sure? No I have to be back for around six. […] Yeah do you want a tayto? No. […] I don’t know. Will you have tea after your shower? I will. Will you have some meringue with it? I’ll have something anyway shure. In Extract (2.4), we see, over a number of speaker turns, the offer and re­offer of food and drink by a mother to her children using the more direct options will or do you want? (see also Chapter 4). The frame is a dinnertime one and the mother has positioned herself as either ‘head chef’ or ‘host’. Refusing the first offer of food or drink is a cultural norm in Irish society (Barron, 2005; O’Keeffe, 2011), therefore, it is not an imposition to re­offer, merely a conver­ sational routine that participants are accustomed to. In addition, are you sure? embodies a social routine, in this case the re­offering of food, that has become ‘pragmatically specialised, protecting the negative face of the hearer’ (O’Keeffe et al., 2007), in that the hearer can opt out and refuse the offer without any loss of face. Therefore, strategies of involvement and non­imposition are rooted in both cultural and local practices (see Chapter 3). These practices can, in turn,

24

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

Table 2.1 Features of a high involvement speech style (adapted from Tannen, 2005) FEATURE

Device

TOPIC

Prefer personal topics Shift topics abruptly Introduce topics without hesitation Persist (if a new topic is not immediately picked up, reintroduce it, repeatedly if necessary) Faster rate of speech Faster turn taking Avoid interturn pauses (silence shows lack of rapport) Co-operative overlap Participatory listenership Tell more stories Tell stories in rounds Prefer internal evaluation (the point of a story is dramatised rather than lexicalised) Expressive phonology Marked pitch and amplitude shifts Marked voice quality Strategic within-turn pauses

PACING

NARRATIVE STRATEGIES EXPRESSIVE PARALINGUISTICS

lead to the creation of individual familylects (Søndergaard, 1991), friendlects or indeed, couplelects. 2.1.3 High involvement strategies The balancing act between involvement and non­imposition, coupled with our desire to co­create and interpret meaning, results in a system of contextualisation cues that are unique to an intimate context­type. Tannen (2005) maintains that shared background and contextual information leads to conversational participants inevitably developing an in­group system of cues to make themselves understood. This system is not random and can, therefore, be captured. Tannen refers to the ‘mixture of devices’ that speakers choose to use in different speech situations as speech style (p. 13), a point we return to in Chapter 3. She identifies a number of features of a high­involvement speech style, based on 160 minutes of recordings made while at a Thanksgiving dinner with six friends. These features were used by some of her group of friends to signal interpersonal involvement and are presented diagrammatically in Table 2.1. Interestingly, three of the guests, the host, his brother and their longstanding friend of twenty years all shared this high involvement style, whereas the other three guests, intimates but to a lesser degree, shared what Tannen (ibid.: 42) calls a ‘high considerateness style’, and, although she does not elaborate on this style in as much detail as the high involvement one, it appears to be characterised by subtle humour, slower pacing practices, fewer narratives and a low percentage of narrative turns. Extract (2.5) features female friends in conversation and is illustrative of many of the features of a high involvement style.

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 25

(2.5)

















Oh I found a euro it’s mine mine I tell you. Oh God the stealer is back. Yeah Una robs loose change lying around the house. Hey I don’t do that anymore. Hello. Hello. Oh come in till we look at the boots and everything. Awh they’re so cute. Awh they’re lovely. They’re like little Eskimo boots. Awh they’re lovely Susan. Awh they’re so nice. Are you ok now are you ready to go? Yeah. And there’s the chain. Michelle awh. Shut up. Michelle O’Sullivan what are you doing? Isn’t that obvious? Did you do the thing I told you to? What did you ask me? To do the thing. Do ye need another hair straightener cos I’m finished with mine? No I have mine. Will I bring it up anyway? Will you get a pole as well so we can hang Michelle from it and lynch her.

We can see, for example, that the topics discussed are personal ones – household issues, clothes, jewellery, hair straighteners – and there is an abrupt shift from one topic to another with little or no introductory or summing up phases. Ventola (1979) demonstrated how friends who have previously acquired knowledge about each other use fewer approach elements (such as small talk, ice breakers etc.) and can move more quickly to what he refers to as centering, where a participant reg­ isters his/her full involvement in conversation. For example, speaker 6 appears to enter the conversation with Hello, a greeting which is reciprocated but she is very quickly integrated into the conversation. In addition, as there are six participants present, the turns are short and fast with no inter turn pausing as speakers work collaboratively so that all participants can take the floor. Table 2.1 identifies narrative strategies as characteristic of a high involvement style. Norrick (1997: 211) maintains that narration, especially collaborative narra­ tion, ‘serves to ratify group membership and modulate rapport in multiple ways.’ Mandelbaum (1987), in a conversation analytic study, draws a parallel between the resolving of structural interactional problems relating to the co­telling of stories by married couples and what this tells us about the nature of speaker relationships.

26

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

When a couple tell a story, two people are required to do together what is normally undertaken by one person. Shared telling requires a lot of interactional work on the part of the narrative co­participants such as monitoring for errors, requesting verifi­ cation and complementary telling. Mandelbaum maintains, however, that this work is not in itself indicative of intimacy. Instead, she suggests that intimacy entails not only the telling of what a co­participant did, but also what he/she thought. Thus claiming, and not being prevented from claiming, another’s thoughts implicitly constitute intimacy. Similarly, Margutti (2007), in a study of third­person refer­ ence, argues that the use of the third person to speak ‘on behalf of’ a co­present family member is used to show intimacy. In addition, Mandelbaum (1987) argues that to allow yourself to be ridiculed in public by your co­teller, and partner, may also be a demonstration of intimacy. This again highlights the importance of narrative in intimate discourse as the sharing of storytelling allows us to access what might be intimate conversational resources (see Chapters 4 and 5 for more on intimate narrative devices). Tannen (2006) also identifies the importance of couple’s performing as a ‘conversational team’ in public. Talking publicly, in this case the couple talk with their friend about a dispute that they had earlier, ‘displays and reinforces their identity as a married couple’ (p. 603) in that they are offered a stage by a third party to reframe their conflict as something good­ humoured, minor and natural. Tannen (1989) also identifies repetition as a feature of a high involvement style. According to Tannen (ibid.) and Gordon (2009: 8) repetition is ‘a fundamental meaning­making strategy in conversational discourse.’ Indeed, Tannen (1989: 97) maintains that it is a ‘limitless resource for individual creativity and interpersonal involvement.’ Repetition can occur synchronically in the on­going, immediate discourse environment (also referred to as intratextual repetition) or diachroni­ cally through referring to prior texts (intertextual repetition). Gordon (2009), in the context of family discourse, outlines a variety of functions that repetition can have, among them a key role in negative events such as arguments (see Tannen, 2006) or nagging (Boxer, 2002) or in positive events such as chat between parents and young children (Ervin­Tripp and Strage, 1985). She acknowledges that it is a context­bound phenomenon and, therefore, its function is often at once both ambiguous and polysemous, but argues that it primarily functions to ‘bind people together’, for example, through repetition, conversations are co­constructed (see Chapter 4, Sections 4.2 and 4.3). Gordon (2009) maintains that it ‘affirms interlocutors’ shared history, mutual access to a set of prior texts and membership to the same group’ (p. 10), echoing Tannen’s (1989) assertion that repetition is a metamessage of rapport and involvement. An example of this is Tannen’s (2006) analysis of repetition (or intertextuality) in the conflict talk of three couples. She investigates how it functions, through the resources of recycling (the regurgitation of topic), reframing (changing what the discourse is about) and rekeying (changing the emotional stance through the use of prosodic features), to renegotiate, reshape and, ultimately, resolve these conflicts. Many of these devices such as topic choice, co­operative overlap, participatory listenership and narrative strategies, although discussed under the auspices of the

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 27 framework of community of practice, will be referred to in the analysis chapters. One of the limitations of using the Limerick Corpus of Irish English is that we only have access to the transcribed interactions and these are not prosodically tagged. Therefore, expressive paralinguistic features such as stress, tone or voice quality will only be mentioned where the transcriber has added extralinguistic informa­ tion such as whispers , for example. In addition, identifying patterns of repetition using corpus methods can be problematic as corpus tools cannot identify individual items ‘prone’ to repetition. However, corpus tools such as con­ cordance plots and keyword lists can go some way towards identifying items that are repeated within a corpus (see, for example, the item yesterday in Chapter 7). Tannen’s (2005) findings were generated from the speech of six friends over the course of one dinner and, therefore, ungeneralisable to a wider context. Corpus linguistics, however, provides the researcher with access to larger amounts of data resulting in findings that may be extended to a wider population. Therefore, we can see the findings of the previous corpus studies outlined in Section 2.2 as both supportive of and complementary to Tannen’s features of a high involvement style.

2.2 Corpus analysis Before we quickly outline some of the background to contemporary corpus lin­ guistics (CL) and then progress to previous corpus studies of intimate discourse, a couple of points should be taken into consideration with regard to the intersection of interaction analysis and corpus linguistics. The first is that although studies such as Ochs and Taylor (1992a) and Ochs and Kremer­Sadlik (2013a) refer, on occasion, to their data as a corpus, they do not employ corpus linguistic tools or methods mentioned here and as outlined in more detail in Chapter 3 to any great extent. They have, however, developed a software package, vPrism, which allows researchers to synchronise their visual footage with transcription. In this sense, they, again on occasion, treat their data almost as a multi­modal corpus; multi­ modal corpora are those that align visual and audio streams and transcription and corpus tools such as concordancers (see, for example, Adolphs et al., 2011). It is more likely that interaction analysis researchers ‘read’ their corpus rather than utilise corpus software which is an intensely qualitative way of performing corpus analysis as the researcher manually scans the entire corpus. This leads us to the second point to be made here – although the corpus studies presented below all employ qualitative research methods to some extent, they make extensive use of corpus linguistic tools and methodologies in order to identify linguistic patterns. This is distinct from a manual examination of a corpus as the starting point is, for example, a corpus frequency list that has been generated by specialised computer software. Hence, the focus of corpus studies is often on different linguistic phe­ nomena than those investigated in interaction studies. 2.2.1 Corpus linguistics: Some background A corpus is a principled collection of electronic texts, in other words, these texts have been assembled with a particular purpose in mind (see O’Keeffe et al., 2007).

28

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

Throughout the history of corpus linguistics, this purpose has often been asso­ ciated with the work of lexicographers who have long aimed to collect as many texts as possible – indeed, McCarthy and O’Keeffe (2010) paint the picture of Dr Samuel Johnson pouring over a paper corpus by candlelight in order to write one of the first comprehensive dictionaries of English. It was the 1990s, which saw the growth of more affordable (and, in terms of size, more manageable) personal computers, that heralded the emergence of CL in the form that we now know it. The ability to store large amounts of data on relatively small computer hard drives held heightened appeal for dictionary writers and, apparently driven by dicta such as there is ‘no data like more data’ (Sinclair, 2001), the age of mega corpora such as the Collins Corpus and the Bank of English™, approx. 2.5 billion words (see http:// www.mycobuild.com/about­collins­corpus.aspx), the Oxford English Corpus, approx. 2 billion words (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/the­oxford­ english­corpus) or the Cambridge English Corpus, approx. 2 billion words (http:// www.cambridge.org/about­us/what­we­do/cambridge­english­corpus), was born. Recently, however, these trends have begun to change. Innovative directions in corpus linguistics, especially in relation to the blend of CL with approaches to language such as the field of pragmatics (see Vaughan and Clancy, 2013), have seen the emergence of smaller, domain­specific corpora, often in the range of 20,000–50,000 words that have been designed to provide an ongoing dialogue between the linguistic item under investigation and the context in which it occurs. In terms of a definition of corpus linguistics, we might occupy ourselves with two component parts. The first of these concerns the language contained in corpora – corpus linguists are primarily concerned with naturally­occurring, real­world data, therefore, the first dimension of a definition of CL is embodied in McEnery and Wilson’s (1996: 1) definition that it is ‘the study of language based on examples of real life language use.’ These real­life examples have, generally speaking, consisted of collections of spoken and/or written language. However, the Internet has now emerged as a potentially infinite site for corpus linguistic research and corpora of computer mediated communication, which straddles both spoken and written language, are fast emerging. As we have already touched upon, written corpora (and, by extension, corpora built using the world­wide web) are generally larger in size than their spoken counterparts due to the financial and time demands involved in constructing a spoken corpus and also ethical and permission issues. However, whether large or small, corpora are generally well­constructed in order that they might address a number of other design criteria such as the concepts of representativeness and balance. Representativeness and balance are key concerns when building a corpus. They refer to the sampling techniques used by a corpus designer to select data for inclusion in their corpus. A corpus designer must ensure that their corpus accu­ rately reflects what it is supposed to reflect. Leech (1991: 27) maintains that a corpus is representative if ‘findings based on its contents can be generalised to a larger hypothetical corpus.’ For example, a small corpus of approximately 50,000 words built of data from a single workplace cannot be said to be representa­ tive of all workplaces and therefore, the results generated are not generalisable.

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 29 However, the corpus design should ensure that this corpus is representative of interactions that are typical of said workplace. Consider, for example, a larger, more general corpus, the Longman Grammar Corpus, which is considered both representative and balanced. The data contained within the corpus was selected on the basis of balance in that it ‘include[s] a manageable number of distinctions while covering much of the range of variation in English’ (Biber et al., 1999: 25). For example, the corpus includes both conversation, the type of language that we most commonly encounter in our day­to­day lives, and academic prose, a highly specialised part of language that we encounter infrequently. These are comple­ mented by data from newspapers and fiction that serves to bridge the ‘extremes’ of conversation and academic prose. Although the concepts of representativeness and balance remain important in CL, specifically in relation to corpus design, attitudes towards them have notably softened as the corpus remit has broad­ ened. Now, representativeness and balance are treated as fluid concepts, reliant on intuition and best estimates and dependent on the research question and the data needed to address it (see, for example, Atkins et al., 1992; Hunston, 2002; Sinclair, 2005; McEnery et al., 2006). Vaughan and Clancy (2013: 56) state that ‘a small corpus builder can address issues of representativeness by ensuring that the samples collected are typical of the speech domain represented by the corpus.’ Biber et al. (1999: 247) maintain that ‘for language studies ... proportional sam­ ples are rarely useful ... a proportional corpus would be of little use to studies of variation, because most of the texts would be relatively homogenous.’ Indeed, sociolinguistic studies have shown that relatively small samples that could be considered technically unrepresentative are sufficient to account for language variation in large cities (see Sankoff, 1988; Tagliamonte, 2006). Similarly, McEnery et al. (2006: 5) maintain that if specialised corpora were discounted on the basis of representativeness and balance, then ‘corpus linguistics would have contributed significantly less to language studies.’ The second dimension in a definition of corpus linguistics centres around epis­ temological concerns. There is currently an ongoing discussion about whether or not CL constitutes a theoretical paradigm in its own right or whether it constitutes a selection of methods and procedures for the examination of a language. This dis­ cussion has led to a distinction between corpus-driven and corpus-based research (see Tognini­Bonelli, 2001). Corpus­based research involves the use of corpus data to inform, enrich or refine an approach to language that may have originated in a discipline distinct from corpus linguistics (McEnery and Hardie, 2012). The corpus­driven approach, on the other hand, argues that corpus linguistics is itself a theoretical approach to language (Teubert, 2005). For corpus­driven research­ ers, ‘the corpus is the sole source of a corpus linguist’s theory of language’ (McEnery and Hardie, 2012: 147). In this sense, there is often a distinction made between pure CL and work which applies CL (Walsh et al., 2011). However, as is ever the case in contemporary corpus linguistic research, the lines between the two are frequently blurred (Baker, 2010: 109). For example, this study is at once corpus­based in that it blends the sociolinguistic community of practice model with a corpus methodology. However, it is the frequency information provided

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Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

by the corpus analysis software that provides us with the focus of our analysis and in this sense the study is simultaneously corpus­driven. It should also be noted at this stage that the study of CL may, on the surface, appear restricted by a series of binary opposites such as spoken versus written, large versus small or corpus­driven versus corpus­based which have been mentioned here; however, contemporary CL is constantly challenging these more traditional tropes. For exam­ ple, diachronic corpus research such as Archer and Culpeper (2009) or McCafferty and Amador­Moreno (2014) have challenged our notions of what might or might not be legitimately considered ‘spoken’, as are corpus studies of e­communication (see Carter and McCarthy, 2015). In addition, as we have already mentioned, the debate in relation to corpus size is being reframed in terms of the purpose that the corpus was built for and the theoretical approach it complements (see also, for example, Flowerdew, 2002). While it may be true that corpus linguistics as a discipline has come far with respect to its origins, taking a corpus approach, as advocated here, enables other approaches to language analysis to be informed, enriched and refined and, subse­ quently, CL itself is also informed, enriched and refined through this interaction. CL has been successfully blended with a number of other linguistic frameworks including, but not limited to, conversation analysis (see, for example, Tao, 2003; Walsh et al., 2011), pragmatics (McCarthy and Carter, 2004a; Romero­Trillo, 2008; Aijmer and Rühlemann, 2015), forensic linguistics (Wools and Coulthard, 1998; Cotterill, 2001), spoken discourse analysis (McCarthy, 1998) and, the focus of this volume, sociolinguistics (Stenström et al., 2002; Baker, 2010). This blend of a corpus approach with other linguistic theories has, as McEnery and Hardie (2012: 1) argue, ‘the potential to reorientate our entire approach to the study of language.’ 2.2.2 Previous corpus studies of intimate discourse Carter (2004) explores the connection between linguistic creativity and social context using the five­million­word Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE). He demonstrates that intimate speech appears to be characterised by the presence of a high density of creative features such as repetition (see Section 2.1), metaphor, idiom, slang and hyperbole. In a series of spoken exchanges between intimates, one extract features flatmates, another partners, Carter observes ‘a marked density of creative formulation’ (p. 162) over a relatively short number of speaker turns. These creative linguistic choices are made by the speakers in order to express emotion and affect while maintaining and, indeed, often reinforcing, interpersonal relationships. Carter’s research sug­ gests that the context and nature of relationships is a determining factor. The more socially symmetrical the speaker relationship and the more engaged the speakers are in the sharing of experiences and ideas, the more likely participants are to engage in creative wordplay and invention (see also Carter and McCarthy, 2004; McCarthy and Carter, 2004b). Carter (2004) proposes a cline of creativity in relation to context­type, which we have represented diagrammatically in Figure 2.1, where the intimate context­type is the most ‘prone’ to creativity.

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 31

Transactional More prone to creativity

Professional Socialising Intimate

Figure 2.1 Mapping creativity and discourse context­type

Carter cautions that creativity is emergent and probabilistic and, therefore, acknowledges that the boundaries in this cline are not clear cut and are likely to overlap. However, it might be that spoken language features identified by Carter as creative are those essential to the creation and maintenance of social groupings such as the family. We have already examined one of these features, repeti­ tion in Section 2.1. Another feature labelled creative is idiomaticity. Although not a corpus study, Hopper et al.’s (1981) analysis of the use of personal idioms demonstrates the importance of these linguistic strategies to intimates. Similarly to Carter (2004), they noted that as a relationship became more intimate, people’s use of ‘personalised communication’, such as the use of idioms with a personal meaning only understood by those in the relationship, increased. In their study, they interviewed the members of 112 co­habiting couples separately and asked them to rate the idioms identified by both members of the couple according to the perceived impact on the relationship – positive, negative or neutral: 75% of the idioms were rated positive even when these idioms expressed displeasure with, or criticism of, a partner. They identified a number of ways in which the use of idioms between couples promotes relationship coherence and identity – for example, idioms can be used to reduce the force of criticism or to reduce embarrassment as couples experiment sexually. Interestingly, although these idioms were thought to be accessible only to members of the couple, 45% of interviewees remarked that other intimates, such as immediate family and very close friends, were aware of these idioms and their meanings. In relation to politeness norms in the intimate context­type, Farr et al. (2004) analysed the occurrence of hedging across various context­types such as family discourse, teacher­trainer feedback, service encounters and female friends chatting in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE). Hedges function as downtoners or mitigators in spoken and written language allowing the speaker/writer to weaken the force of propositional content (Brown and Levinson, 1987; see also Chapters 4 and 6 here). Farr et al. (2004) found the lowest instance of hedging occurred in ser­ vice encounters where ‘there is an existing social schema for the interaction within exogenous roles’ (pp. 16–17) which simultaneously allows maximum transactional efficiency and minimum threat to face. The next least hedged context was the family where hedging was approximately 33% less frequent than in radio phone­in and 50% less frequent than in teacher­training feedback. Clancy (2005; 2011a and b)

32

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

has identified the family as a politeness ‘ground zero’ (after Levinson, 2004), a centre for the acquisition of politeness in society. Clancy (2005) examined the role played in politeness by hedges in this context. He contrasted family discourse with data from a radio phone­in show, Liveline,6 to demonstrate that as the level of for­ mality decreases, the number of hedges used in the different context­types follows suit. Hedges often function to reduce social distance between speakers and also to indicate the speaker’s desire for a relaxed relationship with the addressee (Holmes, 1993). Clancy (2005) notes that the family are sure of their position in relation to other family members due to the fixed and stable speaker relationships, therefore, their need to reduce social distance or create a relaxed relationship is lessened. This reduction of social distance is something that has to be worked at in contexts such as Liveline in order to create the ‘pseudo­intimacy’ crucial to the success of the interaction (see O’Keeffe, 2006), but is unnecessary in the family as the speakers perceive social distance as being negligible. Clancy (2010; 2011a and b) built a corpus of family discourse from within the Irish Traveller Community, a distinct ethnic group in Irish society accoun­ ting for around 1% of the population, in order to demonstrate how factors such as ethnicity, age and level of education play a role in people’s use of pragmatic markers such as hedges and vocatives. He found that hedges were more frequent in the discourse of settled, middle­class families than in Traveller families where they were a relatively rare feature of their discourse. In contrast, voca­ tives, although frequent in middle­class family discourse, were more frequent in the Traveller data. Factors such as ethnicity – the Traveller Community priori­ tise family to such an extent that their social networks consist almost entirely of extended family – and level of education – two­thirds of all Travellers in Ireland are educated to, at most, primary level – play a large part in this discre­ pancy. Vaughan and Clancy (2013) have also used family discourse, this time in contrast with workplace discourse, to illustrate how community and identity are defined through the use of the personal pronoun we. In relation to the pragmatic function of we, in family discourse, the pronoun was found to index identity through the establishment of in­groups and out­groups, thus defining the fam­ ily group through a process of inclusivity and exclusivity. In contrast, when the context­type changed to the workplace where the same degree of intimacy is not shared among participants, we was seen to take on a range of ever more com­ plex functions in relation to politeness. Locher (2004), in a non­corpus study, examined a range of disagreement strategies (hedges, modal auxiliaries, question types) in an argument sequence during a dinner among family and friends. She found that hedges were the most frequent strategy used by the interactants to soften disagreement (followed by modal auxiliaries). These strategies to soften disagreement are necessary, she maintains, to ensure that the argument remains within a sociable frame. Therefore, it might be that many devices associated with politeness demonstrate a marked reduction in frequency in the intimate context­ type when compared to discourse in other contexts. In a corpus study of the discourse of friends, O’Keeffe and Adolphs (2008) examine the occurrence of response tokens in both the Cambridge and Nottingham

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 33 Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) and the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE). At the level of language variety, they found a higher frequency and a broader range of one­word and two­word response tokens in British English than in Irish English. In order to investigate the function of these tokens, they constructed two parallel sub­corpora in CANCODE and LCIE – two 20,000­word corpora of the interactions between close, co­habiting female friends, all of whom were around the age of twenty and in third level education. They found the functional comparison, in general, to be reasonably similar but, in line with their broader findings, response tokens were 59% more frequent amongst British female friends. In both sub­corpora, convergence tokens, response tokens that bring about agreement and convergence and may result in topic shift, were the most frequent followed by engagement tokens – those that work at an affective level to show emotions such as enthusiasm, sympathy, surprise or disgust and are indicative of a high level of engagement on the hearer’s part. Therefore, in this instance we see the potential for corpus studies to complement the findings from studies in interaction analysis. We have already explored in detail Tannen’s (2005) features of high involvement speech style in which she identifies ‘participatory listenership’ as one of the devices (see Section 2.1). It might be that this participa­ tory listenership is signalled by a high frequency of response tokens that indicate convergence and engagement. McCarthy (2015) builds on the work of O’Keeffe and Adolphs (2008) through a comparative analysis of fully lexical turn openers (for example, Jesus, grand, that’s true, I see, etc.) in Irish and British English. This study also utilises both the CANCODE and LCIE corpora; on this occasion focusing on both the intimate and socialising context­types in both corpora (see Section 2.3 for a discussion of these context­types). Similar to O’Keeffe and Adolphs (2008), McCarthy points to a higher frequency and broader range of single and 2­word response token turns in British English but notes that the Irish data contains more 3­ and 4­word clusters occupying the whole turn perhaps indicating that British English speakers prefer shorter responses whereas Irish English speak­ ers prefer longer ones. McCarthy further complements O’Keeffe and Adolphs’ (2008) work by examining turn openers that are not just response tokens but are also the opening of a turn which takes the conversational floor. In these instances, he notes a narrowing of the frequency difference between British and Irish speakers with respect to the use of single and 2­word items. This narrow­ ing is also evident when adjectives that occur with the turn openers it is/it’s/’tis and that is/that’s are considered. These adjectives show considerable overlap; however, Irish English is characterised by the use of adjectives such as brutal, mad, crazy, handy and desperate. McCarthy (2015: 173) argues that the use of these adjectives, coupled with the high frequency of religious interjections noted by O’Keeffe and Adolphs, reflects a pragmatic system where ‘intensity and intimacy (or even pseudo­intimacy) generate an expressiveness that belongs to and helps to define the variety.’ Although ostensibly a sociolinguistic study that explores linguistic variation in relation to the social variables age and gender, Murphy’s (2010) study can throw

34

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

some light on the discourse of friends. She employs a corpus of c.45,000 words to investigate linguistic variation amongst women in Ireland in three age categories – 20s, 40s and 70s/80s. Murphy suggests that there are a number of contextual factors for the differences found between the age groups, for example, a low level of taboo language is found in the 70s/80s group in comparison to the other groups due, in part, to the declining influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland. In addition, and of note here, the women in their 70s/80s are longstanding friends whereas the younger groups do not know each other very well. This familiarity has an impact on variation, most notably in relation to the use of hedges, vague language and boosters in the speech of the 70s/80s age group. As with Clancy (2005; 2011a and b), Murphy found a lower frequency of hedges amongst the more intimate group because of the security provided by an already solid relationship. On the other hand, Murphy discovered relatively high levels of both vague language and boost­ ers in the speech of the 70s/80s group in comparison to the other two age groups. As Chapter 6 will demonstrate, increased intimacy creates high levels of shared knowledge which, in turn, leads to higher levels of implicitness characterised by vague language. Similarly, boosters, markers of directness and confidence (Carter and McCarthy, 2006), are common in the conversations between these friends as ‘the longevity of their relationship means that they can speak their minds freely’ (Murphy, 2010: 207). Quaglio (2009) compares the language of the popular US television sitcom Friends to natural conversation. His Friends corpus consists of 600,000 words of transcripts (not scripts, he stresses) from the show and this data is contrasted with the four­million­word American conversational sub­corpus of the Longman Grammar Corpus (Biber et al., 1999). As we have already discussed, this sub­ corpus is designed to be representative of American speech. Quaglio (2009) demonstrates how Friends shares the core linguistic features of natural conversa­ tion to a greater or lesser extent. For example, vague language (kind of, stuff, or something) and narrativeness (marked by the presence of third person pronouns, past tense verbs or non­minimal response tokens) are much more prevalent in casual conversation. In contrast, emotional language (adverbial intensifiers such as so, emphatic do, slang terms such as freak out) and markers of informality (expletives, slang terms such as cool, vocatives such as dude) are more frequent in the Friends data. These differences can, of course, be attributed to the constraints of the televised medium and the restrictions it imposes on linguistic items such as the use of taboo language. However, the different situational characteristics of the two corpora cannot be overlooked: 53% of the data in the American conversation corpus is ‘intimate’, family and friends chatting in the home environment, but the corpus also includes task­ and work­related conversations from transactional, professional and pedagogic context­types. Therefore, as Quaglio argues, it might be that the discourse represented in Friends is more representative of intimate discourse than that in the American conversation sub­corpus. This means that inti­ mate discourse may in fact be characterised by a high level of emotive language (and, indeed, Carter (2004) suggests linguistic creativity conveys emotion) and markers of informality.

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 35 Table 2.2 Other features of a high involvement, intimate speech style FEATURE

Device

CREATIVE

High frequency of devices such as repetition, metaphor, idiom, slang or hyperbole High frequency of vocatives High frequency of both convergence and engagement response tokens Low frequency of the pronoun we High frequency of third person pronouns High frequency of boosters Low frequency of pragmatic markers in the form of hedges High frequency of vague language High frequency of taboo language

DISCOURSAL GRAMMATICAL PRAGMATIC

In order to complement Tannen’s (2005) findings then, it is possible to generate a corresponding table of corpus­informed high involvement strategies that char­ acterise intimate discourse. These phenomena have a different focus to Tannen’s but are no less important and certainly more generalisable given the comparative language samples involved. Table 2.2 outlines a number of these creative, gram­ matical, discoursal and pragmatic features and the corresponding devices and, exclusive to a corpus linguistic analysis, their frequency of realisation. Therefore, we can ascertain that intimate discourse demonstrating a high involvement speech style is not only characterised by structural and paralingui­ stic strategies but also by certain creative, discoursal, grammatical and pragmatic strategies. In order to further explore these interactive strategies, we will utilise the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT), a sub­corpus of the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE).

2.3 The Limerick Corpus of Irish English The Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) is a one­million­word corpus of contemporary spoken Irish English. The corpus was collected between the years 1998 and 2003 in a variety of contexts in the Republic of Ireland (LCIE does not contain any data from Northern Ireland or from Donegal). The inspiration for LCIE came from the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE), a five­million­word corpus designed to represent spoken British (and some Irish) English. LCIE was designed to parallel the CANCODE design matrix (see McCarthy, 1998) and both design teams worked, and have continued to work, in close collaboration with one another. In their initial corpus design phase the CANCODE team developed a set of spoken text­types to correspond to exist­ ing text typologies for the written language. They adopted what McCarthy (1998) terms a ‘genre­based’ approach where not only is a population of speakers targeted, but the context and environment in which the speech is produced is also taken into consideration. This genre­based approach, according to McCarthy (ibid.: 9),

36

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

‘offers the possibility of linking their [the data’s] contextual and social features directly with the lexico­grammatical ‘nuts and bolts’ of their step­by­step creation.’ The framework used for CANCODE sought to combine the nature of speaker relationship with goal­types prevalent in everyday, spoken interaction. Therefore, both LCIE and CANCODE differentiate between five different types of speaker relationship, referred to as context-types, these are intimate, socialising, professional, transactional and pedagogic, and three different goal­types, collaborative idea, collaborative task and information provision. Both the context­types and the goal­types are operationalised in Table 2.3. In relation to context­types, in Chapter 1 we have already explored the notion of intimate discourse. The pedagogic context­type pertains to any relationship between speakers in an educational context, for example, tutorials, seminars or lectures. Transactional, the most ‘public’ context­type, is characterised by speaker relationships that have the exchange of goods as their primary goal. Professional is concerned with the workplace – in this respect, a conversation between work colleagues is termed professional, whereas a conversation between, for example, a shop assistant and a customer is deemed transactional in nature. Socialising, the closest context­type to intimate discourse, is marked by friendship and charac­ terised by a relationship between conversational participants that voluntarily come together for the purposes of conversation. In relation to goal­types, collaborative idea is, according to McCarthy (1998: 10), ‘concerned with the interactive sharing of thoughts, judgements, opinions and attitudes.’ Collaborative task refers to con­ versational participants interacting with their physical environment while talking and information provision ‘is primarily uni­directional, with one party imparting information to others’ (ibid.). LCIE is accompanied by a detailed database that provides us with a wealth of information about the corpus. It contains some 369 files, each individual file representing a single conversation. These files range in size from the shortest conversation, 58 words and classified as professional collaborative idea, to the Table 2.3 CANCODE’s matrix of speech genres operationalised (adapted from McCarthy, 1998) Collaborative Idea

Collaborative Task

Information Provision

Pedagogical

Group tutorial

Lecture

Professional

Office meeting

Transactional

Chatting with bank clerk Chatting with friends about shared experiences Discussing family matters

Individual tutorial – discussing student’s work Colleagues moving furniture Buying a stereo system Assembling shelves

Cooking together

Relating story of film seen

Socialising

Intimate

Work presentation Commentary by library tour guide Telling jokes

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 37 CITE 90001001 90002001 90002002 90004001 900285001 9004&l01 90046002 90051002 90052001 90053001 90053002 90054001 90007001 90007002 90007003 90008001 90008002 90027001 90090001 90092001

TinE family chatting in the kitchen Putting up the Christmas Tree Decorating the house for chrismas family chatting about the day family and close friends chatting Chatting in the car • Chatting in mobile home Arriving somewhere Morning after a night-out friends/family chatting friends inn the car chatting friends out walking Informal interview Informal interview Informal interview Informal interview Informal interview family chatting Teacher-Trainer feedback Discussion regarding politics and Ireland •

• Rec_Year • Tape 1998 M0001 M0002 1998 1998 M0002 1999 M0004 M0285 2003 2001 M0046 2001 M0046 2001 M0051 2001 M0052 M0053 2001 2001 M0053 2001 M0054 M0007 1998 1998 M0007 M0007 1998 1998 M0008 1998 M0008 M0027 1999 1999 M0090 M0092 1999

• SPEAKER • WORDS • PROXIMITY • RElATIONSHIP_ · 3

1635 face to face 2133 face to face 2021 face to face 4253 face to face 18698 face to face 14553 face to face 10248 face to face 538 face to face 4939 face to face 1509 face to face 1990 face to face 1813 face to face 1670 face to face 1474 face to face 1314 face to face 1525 face to face 1966 face to face 2698 face to face 6503 face to face 6276 face to face

intimate intimate intimate intimate intimate intimate intimate intimate intimate

intimate intimate intimate socio-cultural

socio-cultural socio-cultural intimate socio-cultural intimate pedagogic professional

INTERACTION_TYPE coli idea coli task coli task coli idea coli idea coli idea coli idea coli idea coli idea coli idea coli idea coli idea info prov info prov info prov info prov info prov coli task coli idea info prov

Figure 2.2 Sample information from LCIE database

longest, 18,698 words, classified in the LCIE database as intimate collaborative idea. Figure 2.2 illustrates some of the information available to us. Figure 2.2 demonstrates that each file was given a title such as ‘family chatting in the kitchen’ (line 1), the year it was recorded, the number of speakers etc. The majority of the data collection in LCIE was opportunistic, therefore, because it is housed at Mary Immaculate College and the University of Limerick, the data was primarily collected by students and staff who took recording devices ‘home’ and made their recordings there. This resulted in a corpus dominated by intimate discourse as we illustrate graphically in Figure 2.3. As we can see, the context­types of pedagogical, professional, transactional and socialising, when combined, account for 44% of the total data in LCIE; 56% of the total corpus has been classified intimate and, therefore, makes LCIE ideally suited to the investigation of discourse in this context­type. The participants in the LCIE corpus were also given a detailed speaker information sheet to complete in relation to each conversation. Therefore, the LCIE database also contains detailed demo­ graphic information such as age and gender and also information about where the speakers were born and where they lived at the time of recording (geographical information) and level of education. Figure 2.4 details some of the information that was recorded with respect to each conversation. This information complements the genre­based design of the corpus allowing us to perform sociolinguistics studies of the intimate context­type such as this one. For example, we already know from Figure 2.3 that the first file, ‘family chatting in the kitchen’, has been classified intimate collaborative idea and features three speakers. The demographic information allows us to construct a more detailed pro­ file of who these speakers are. Figure 2.4 demonstrates that speaker 1 chatting in the kitchen is female and 48 years old. She was born in Limerick (S1_BPlace) and was living there at the time the conversation was recorded (S1_Area) and working as a primary school teacher. The same information is also available for speaker 2 (and also for speaker 3 but has been removed from Figure 2.4 for the purposes of

38

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse

The Limerick Corpus of Irish English 5%

1%

12%

Intimate Socialising Professional

56%

Pedagogic Transactional

26%

Figure 2.3 Proportional data distribution in respect to context­types in LCIE

this illustration). Coincidentally and, perhaps, ironically, Figure 2.4 also highlights one of the limitation of corpus linguistic research – we are limited by the corpus we are working with (this point is also part of our concluding discussion in Chapter 8). The conversation ‘family and close friends chatting’ (line 5 in Figure 2.4), already flagged as the conversation with the most words in LCIE, has no demographic information attached. Therefore, although we can include it in our analysis of inti­ mate discourse, it will not provide many further sociolinguistic insights. In addition to a speaker information sheet, participants in LCIE also signed a consent form guaranteeing them anonymity when the data was to be used for research and publications. The conversations are broadly transcribed as evidenced in Extracts 2.1–2.5 here; this means that they have been coded for aspects of spoken • ~ TITLE 900011101 Family chatting in the kitchen 900011101 Putting up the Christmas Tree 900011101 Decorating the house for chrismas 900041101 Family chatting about the day 91101851101 Family and close friends chatting 90046001 Chattinginthecar' 9110461101 Chatting in mobile home 900511101 Arriving somewhere 900511101 Morning after anight-out 90053001 Friends/Family chatting 90053001 Friendsinnthecarchatting 900S4001 Friends out walking 900071101 Informal interview 900071101 Informal interview 900071103 Informal interview 9000!001 Informal interview 9000!001 Informal interview 9110171101 Family chatting 90090001 Teacher-Trainer Feedback 9110911101 Discussion regarding politics and Ireland

Sl_age • S1_age • Sl_Sex • S1_Sex • Sl_BPiace • S1_BPiace • Sl_Area • S1_Area •

48

so 23 19 20 27 22 22

13 14 14 14 20 1.5

so

so so so

22 22 23 13 23 23 23

18 18 17 17 17 18 17

F

M

51_OCCUpation

51_OCCUpation

limerick limerick

Umerick limerick limerick Umerick limerick Umenck limerick Umenck

Primary school teacher Steeplejack Third level student Third level student

Postgraduate student Second level student Second level student Third level student

Wexford Watertord Cork Cork Cork Cork Cork Killarney Umerick Bandon Ennis Nenagh

Ennisoorth Enniscorthy Ennisoorth Enniscorthy limerick Cor'< limerick Cor'< Cor'< Cor'< limerick Cor'< Umerick Cor'< Umerick Killarney Umerick umenck Umerick Bandon Umerick Ennis limerick Nenagh

Student Secretary Student Student

Tele-sales operator Child

Umerick Umerick

Umerick Umerick

limerick limerick Wexford Manchester Cork Cork Cork Cork Cork Kildare Kildare Kildare Kildare Kildare

Figure 2.4 Sample demographic information from LCIE database

Housewife

Housewife Housewife Solicitor

Student Student Third level student Third level student Third level student Third level student Third level student

Student student Second level student Second level student Second level student Third level student Second level student

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 39 language such as false starts, hesitations, overlaps and interruptions. Background noise and extralinguistic information such as laughter have also been included (a full list of the LCIE transcription conventions can be found towards the front of the book). The conversations have not been tagged prosodically, therefore there is no information concerning voice intonation or stress patterning, for example. With all of this information in mind, we turn our attention to a more nuanced look at the composition of the intimate portion of the corpus which we have dubbed the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk or, more simply, LINT. 2.3.1 Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk The Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT) is the sub­corpus of LCIE that will be used to provide the data that inform the methodological and analytical insights for this book. The LINT corpus is approximately 600,000 words in size and con­ tains 208 texts ranging from a 149­word conversation featuring three speakers, given the title ‘close family/friends chatting about sick friend’ in the LCIE data­ base, to the aforementioned 18,698­word conversation. As the title of this book suggests, intimate discourse takes place on three ‘sites’ – couples, (extended) family and close friends. Rather than limiting the investigation to one particular site of intimate discourse, such as the family, we took the decision to investigate intimate discourse as a whole across all three settings. In terms of the data con­ tained within LINT, the goal­types are remarkably similar across the three sites. For example, a conversation marked family collaborative idea is given the title ‘family chatting about the day’, whereas one involving friends is called ‘friends chatting about the day’. Similarly, the files labelled collaborative task involve couples, family or friends engaged in everyday activities such as cooking, driving, getting ready for Christmas or assembling furniture. Interestingly, only one con­ versation marked intimate in LINT is deemed to be information provision – this conversation is unique in some respects as it features two friends engaged in an informal interview process for the purpose of a research project. This has been labelled intimate because the friends self­identified in this way. The lack of the information provision goal­type in intimate discourse points towards the unlike­ lihood, and unsuitability, of uni­directional conversation in this context­type. As Chapter 4 will demonstrate, even sequences with the potential to be information provision, such as narratives or jokes, are co­constructed by all participants in the conversation, thereby rendering this conversational goal­type somewhat redundant in an intimate context. LINT also again highlights some of the inherent drawbacks associated with working with a corpus. In Chapter 7, we proposed to investigate linguistic vari­ ation between the three sites of intimate discourse rather than treating intimate discourse as a whole as in the other chapters in this book. This division has proven to be problematic however, given the information contained in the LCIE database. As we have already seen, on occasion in the database, a conversation is labelled ‘family and close friends chatting’ and, therefore, although the context­type and goal­type are often not at issue, the site of the discourse is. Similarly, files, although

40

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk 1% 11% Unclassified 15%

Friends Family 53%

Family/friends Couples

20%

Figure 2.5 Proportional data distribution in LINT

labelled intimate, have been given titles such as ‘chatting after a night out’, ‘discussing music’ or simply ‘decorating’ and, therefore, in these cases it is not possible to identify the site from the database. Figure 2.5 illustrates the data dis­ tribution in LINT based on these issues. Files that have been given titles such as ‘decorating’ have been categorised as ‘unclassified’ here. We can see that the unclassified category is the largest in LINT at 54%, followed by friends, 20%, family, 15%, family/friends, 11%, and finally couples at 1% of the files contained in LINT. Because the majority of the data in LINT cannot be accurately assigned to one of the three intimate sites, the data is, generally speak­ ing, treated as a whole in the book. However, as we mentioned, Chapter 7 proposes to compare and contrast the three intimate sites and at that point we will return to address the issue of data distribution in LINT.

2.4 Conclusion This chapter covered considerable ground in order to overview two broad approaches that have been used in the study of intimate discourse. We have seen the contribution of both qualitative and quantitative research and the insights pro­ vided by these complementary approaches. As a largely qualitative enterprise, interaction analysis concentrates on individual speech activities and examines what happens both linguistically and non­linguistically to frame them as such. Interaction analysis has been instrumental in our understanding of linguistic reali­ sations of the delicate balance of power in intimate discourse. Members of the three intimate sites, couples, family and close friends, constantly walk a tightrope between the need for involvement and the need for non­imposition. Parents need to discipline children, couples need to assign household chores and friends need to

Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 41 discuss the events of the previous night out, while at the same time maintaining their relationships. Interaction analysis has also been responsible for categorising some of the features of this high involvement speech style in terms of topic, pacing, narrative and paralinguistic strategies. We argued, however, that interaction analysis as a largely qualitative approach could benefit from some quantitative support and that this might come from contemporary corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics can supply large amounts of real­life, naturally­occurring data and the software necessary to analyse it, which, in turn, can facilitate generalisation across different social groups such as couples, family or friends. Contemporary corpus linguistics is also increasingly open and attuned to the advantages that accrue when corpus methods and tools are blended with other approaches to language. Hence, in this instance, we saw how previous corpus studies simul­ taneously complemented, supported and developed the findings from studies in interaction analysis. The reason for writing this book also revolves around the blend of corpus linguistics and a sociolinguistic approach to language, specifically the commu­ nity of practice model, and it is this blend that is our focus in Chapter 3. We have already illustrated, through the overview of previous studies, the suitability of corpus methodology and tools for identifying linguistic patterns in a particular linguistic context­type. However, the community of practice model allows us to take this analysis a step further as ‘it is only through looking at localised practice that we begin to understand not only what sorts of language patterns correlate with which groups but why people use the language features they do’ (Wolfram and Schilling­Estes, 2006: 245).

Notes 1 All extracts in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are taken from the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk. 2 In Tryggvason’s study the target child was aged between 9 and 13 years. 3 Gender­based findings such as those of Tryggvason (2006) and De Geer and Tulviste (2002) show considerable cross­cultural variation. For example, Blum­Kulka (1997) observes that in Jewish American families, the fathers take a larger talking space than the mothers. 4 Tannen (2005: 37) expresses the ‘need for non­imposition’ more positively as the ‘need for considerateness’. 5 The Irish English tayto is equivalent to the British English potato crisp or the American English potato chip. 6 Liveline is an afternoon radio phone­in broadcast on national Irish radio by the national broadcaster Radio Teilifís Éireann.

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Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 43 Farr, F., B. Murphy and A. O’Keeffe, 2004. ‘The Limerick Corpus of Irish English: Design, description and application.’ Teanga, 21, 5–30. Flowerdew, L., 2002. Corpus­based analyses in EAP. In: J. Flowerdew (ed.), Academic Discourse. London: Longman, 95–114. Garro, L., 2013. Health as a family matter. In: E. Ochs and T. Kremer­Sadlik (eds.), FastForward Family: Home, work and relationships in middle-class America. London: University of California Press, 192–216. Goffman, E., 1974. Frame Analysis: An essay on the organisation of experience. New York: Harper and Row. Gordon, C., 2009. Making Meanings, Creating Family: Intertextuality and framing in family interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graesch, A., 2013. At home. In: E. Ochs and T. Kremer­Sadlik (eds.), Fast-Forward Family: Home, work and relationships in middle-class America. London: University of California Press, 27–47. Gumperz, J., 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J., 2001. Interactional sociolinguistics: A personal perspective. In: D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen and H. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 215–228. Halliday, M.A.K., 1978. Language as a Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Holmes, J., 1993. ‘New Zealand women are good to talk to: An analysis of politeness strategies in interaction.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 20, 91–116. Hopper, R., M. Knapp and L. Scott, 1981. ‘Couples’ personal idioms: Exploring intimate talk.’ Journal of Communication, 31(1), 23–33. Hunston, S., 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, D., 1974. Foundations of Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. If I’m Dyin’ I’m Lyin’, Family Guy. Season 2, Episode 9. 20th Century Fox Television USA, 4 April 2000, Fox Network. 22 minutes. James, D. and J. Drakich, 1993. Understanding gender differences in amount of talk: A critical review of research. In: D. Tannen (ed.), Gender and Conversational Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 281–312. Jautz, S., 2008. Gratitude in British and New Zealand radio programmes: Nothing but gushing? In: K. Schneider and A. Barron (eds.), Variational Pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 141–178. Kendall, S., 2006. ‘“Honey, I’m home!”: Framing in family dinnertime homecomings.’ Text and Talk, 26(4/5), 411–441. Kendall, S., 2007. Introduction: Family Talk. In: D. Tannen, S. Kendall and C. Gordon (eds.), Family Talk: Discourse and identity in four American families. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 3–23. Kendall, S., 2008. ‘The balancing act: Framing gendered parental identities at dinnertime.’ Language in Society, 37, 539–568. Lakoff, R., 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper Colophon. Leech, G., 1991. The state of the art in corpus linguistics. In: K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.), English Corpus Linguistics. London: Longman, 8–30. Levinson, S., 2004. Deixis. In: L. Horn and G. Ward (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 97–121. Locher, M., 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in oral communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Approaches to analysing intimate discourse 45 O’Keeffe, A., 2006. Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge. O’Keeffe, A., 2011. ‘Teaching and Irish English.’ English Today, 27(2), 58–64. O’Keeffe, A. and S. Adolphs, 2008. Response tokens in British and Irish discourse: Corpus, context and variational pragmatics. In: K. Schneider and A. Barron (eds.), Variational Pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 69–98. O’Keeffe, A., M. McCarthy and R. Carter, 2007. From Corpus to Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quaglio, P., 2009. Television Dialogue: The sitcom Friends vs. natural conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Repetti, R., D. Saxbe and S. Wang, 2013. Stress. In: E. Ochs and T. Kremer­Sadlik (eds.), Fast-Forward Family: Home, work and relationships in middle-class America. London: University of California Press, 174–191. Romero­Trillo, J. (ed.), 2008. Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics: A mutualistic entente. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rühlemann, C., 2010. What can a corpus tell us about pragmatics? In: A. O’Keeffe and M. McCarthy (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London: Routledge, 288–301. Sankoff, D., 1988. Problems of representativeness. In: U. Ammon, N. Dittmar and K. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 899–903. Sinclair, J.M., 2001. Preface. In: M. Ghadessy, A. Henry and R.L. Roseberry (eds.), Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, vii–xv. Sinclair, J.M., 2005. Corpus and text – basic principles. In: M. Wynne (ed.), Developing Linguistic Corpora: A guide to good practice. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1–16. Søndergaard, B., 1991. ‘Switching between seven codes within one family – a linguistic resource.’ Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 12(1&2), 85–92. Stenström, A.­B., G. Andersen and I.­K. Hasund, 2002. Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Straehle, C., 1993. “Samuel?” “Yes, Dear?”: Teasing and conversational rapport. In: D. Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 210–230. Tagliamonte, S., 2006. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D., 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D., 1992. Interactional sociolinguistics. In: W. Bright (ed.), Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 9–11. Tannen, D., 1994. The sex–class linked framing of talk at work. In: D. Tannen (ed.), Gender and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 195–221. Tannen, D., 2001. ‘I only say this because I love you’: Talking to your parents, partner, kids and sibs when you’re all adults. New York: Ballantine. Tannen, D., 2005. Conversational Style: Analysing talk among friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, D., 2006. ‘Intertextuality in interaction: Reframing family arguments in public and private.’ Text and Talk, 26(4/5), 597–617. Tannen, D. and M. Harness Goodwin, 2006. ‘Introduction.’ Text and Talk, 26(4/5), 407–409. Tannen, D. and C. Wallat, 1993. Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction: Examples from a medical examination/interview. In: D. Tannen (ed.), Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 57–76.

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

Chandler: Ross: Monica: Ross: Monica: Ross: Monica: Ross: Monica: Ross: Monica: Chandler:

Why would I kiss a girl and then put her on your bed? Well then who was on my bed? Oh! Oh! Oh! [pause] No! No! No! Yes! You were under the pile of coats? I was the pile of coats! Oh my! You were my midnight mystery kisser? You were my first kiss with Rachel? You were my first kiss ever? What did I marry into? (The One where the Stripper Cries, Friends, Season 10, Episode 11)

3.0 Introduction In the last chapter, we discussed how corpus linguistics can generate findings but does not, in itself, provide us with an overarching framework within which to analyse them. The choice of theoretical framework with which we can explain these findings then becomes very important to a corpus linguist. In Chapter 2, we profiled one such framework for the interpretation of intimate discourse – interaction analysis – and briefly discussed the benefits of a blend of corpus linguistics and interaction analysis. The framework that we will exemplify in this chapter, and which we will argue is eminently suitable for the analysis of intimate discourse, is the community of practice model. Our blending of this model with a corpus linguistic methodology is a relatively new departure in the field of corpus linguistics. The community of practice has, in the past, been sparingly used by corpus linguists but perhaps not in a critical way or in a way that lays bare the decisions that were taken analytically. Therefore, our aim here is to ‘expose’ the blend of community of practice and corpus linguistics through the process of operationalising it using a corpus methodology. This allows us to examine, and argue in favour of, the reciprocal benefits of this blend.

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Before exploring in more detail the dimensions of the community of practice model, we think it a useful exercise to first reflect on our own practices within the three intimate sites – couples, family and close friends. Wenger (1998: 7) points out that ‘communities of practice are an integral part of our daily lives. They are so informal and so pervasive that they rarely come into explicit focus, but for the same reasons they are also quite familiar.’ At this juncture we encourage you to visualise, for example, your family dinner table. In general, at the dinner table, there may be particular seats assigned to particular family members, and to sit in the seat not allocated to you would represent a ‘break’ from practice. On the other hand, another family may not have pre-assigned seats, and, indeed, may not eat dinner together at all but, at the same time, will have different practices that they adhere to. To serve as an example, in the following Extract (3.1), a family are erecting their Christmas tree. During the conversation, an exchange about suitable decorations for the tree takes place.

(3.1) [Putting up a Christmas tree; speakers have been assigned their familial roles] Jimmy where are you going with the robin?

Eating him .

Jimmy nothing goes on the tree that isn’t silver or glass.

Or approved by mum.

Now+

He’s white.

+take it off. In western society at least, Christmas has become ritualised as a family occasion (Cheal, 2008). At the crux of Extract (3.1) is the general ‘practice’ of preparing for and engaging in the rituals that constitute Christmas. In the extract, son 1, Jimmy, wants to put a decoration, a robin, on the tree. Both the daughter and son 2 reprimand their younger sibling for this. Their reasoning is that no decoration is permitted on the tree that is not a certain colour or pre-approved by their mother. This is a practice that has developed within the family that the older siblings are acutely aware of as part of their shared practices but the younger son has perhaps not learned. Indeed, the practice is confirmed by the mother who tells her younger son to remove the decoration from the tree. This correction of the younger family member’s practice demonstrates that the older siblings are further along in their apprenticeship than their younger counterpart. We can also see similar shared practices, linguistic or otherwise, when we reflect on our experience of couples, one member may do the washing up and one member cook for example, or friends where within a friendship group, one friend might take responsibility for organising the group’s social activities. This chapter breaks down the community of practice framework into its constituent parts in order that we might discover these practices and so reconceptualise the framework and apply it to the

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 49 intimate context-type. Our first step in this process is to examine how the model has been described previously.

3.1 The community of practice The community of practice (henceforth, CofP) model emerged from Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work which was a response to cognitive models of education that prioritised the individual mind and a learning process that involved elaborate series of prefabricated codes and structures (Hanks, 1992). They argued that these previous models of education did not sufficiently address the importance of social relationships to learning. The importance of social relationships to learning became obvious to them in their earlier work observing how different apprentices, for example, tailors in Liberia or midwives in México, progressed to mastery of their craft without engaging in formal educational modes such as the teacher/student dyad or examinations. Therefore, they argue that in order to properly understand the meaning of apprenticeship, it is necessary to understand the relationship between learning and the social situation in which this learning takes place. Learning is an integral part of our everyday conversational experiences. As we co-participate in various conversations in various contexts, we gradually gain access to knowledge that we did not previously have. For example, our experience the first time our car breaks down and we enter the mechanic’s domain is a different one to the fourth, fifth or indeed sixth occasion we return with that same car. Similarly, a child interacting with adults, as in Extract (3.1) above, quickly learns what is expected of him/her within their family group. Holmes and Meyerhoff (1999: 174) maintain that ‘the process of becoming a member of a CofP – as when we join a new workplace, a book group or a new family (e.g. through marriage) – involves learning’. Our concern here is with social learning and how it is visible in linguistic data – for example, in the opening extract in the chapter from Friends, Chandler, through dialogue with his wife and his brother-in-law, learns something about his new family. Data such as this also represents the attraction of the CofP model for researchers – it is instinctively appealing because of our familiarity with the situations, however, the challenge lies in unearthing the linguistic patterns that create and sustain groups such as the family. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of learning is situated in social contexts where people come together in groups in order to learn. In this book, the groups we look at – families, couples and close friendship groups – form unique communities with their own ‘ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short practices’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992: 464). In the CofP model, learning takes place through what Lave and Wenger (1991) call legitimate peripheral participation in these practices. Wenger (1998: 100) maintains that communities of practice contain ‘modified forms of participation that are structured to open the practice to non-members’ and, through the existence of these practices, new members are legitimised in their entry. Therefore, initially in our learning, we are at the periphery, rather like an apprentice, observing and participating to a limited extent with the core members, or experts, and

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practices of the community. In order to contextualise this notion of legitimate peripheral participation, take, for example, the family. There are expert members or practitioners – the parents – and novice or apprentice members – the children. The parents are the members that develop ‘the rules’ of the community. However, these rules are emergent, not written in stone, and they become recognisable and can be implemented because they are habitual. Novice members enter the family by birth or through marriage, and, through observation and participation in activities, learn what it means to be a full member of that particular family. Intimate communities of practice are fundamental to the overall concept. Membership of intimate CofPs is crucial to the establishment of a person’s ability to manage their involvement in other CofPs. We argue that it is in the family that we first receive our first experience of apprenticeship and what is required to move from peripheral to core membership. We can apply what we have learned there as we move beyond the family and come into contact with other communities of practice. This focus on groups such as the family then provides the sociolinguistic researcher with a tangible middle ground that provides a link between the individual and wider social groupings such as the speech community (see, for example, Labov, 1972). Our focus in the book is primarily on intimates’ linguistic practices for a variety of reasons that we will explore in more detail as the chapter unfolds. In previous studies, the community of practice has proven to be a promising framework for the investigation of language in use (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992 and 1999; Holmes and Meyerhoff, 1999; King, 2014). As we will see, the model allows us to identify the linguistic practices involved in a community’s formation and maintenance. These linguistic practices associated with intimate communities such as the family will be identified and quantified using corpus methods in order to demonstrate that an intimate community of practice, and, by extension, other communities of practice, is characterised by, amongst other things, a unique turntaking and interpersonal system. To date, the concept of the CofP has been utilised most frequently by researchers studying gender (see, for example, Holmes, 1999), sub-cultures (for example, Bucholtz, 1998; Eckert, 1989, 2000) and the workplace (for example, Wenger et al., 2002; McCarthy and Handford, 2004; Mullany, 2004; Schnurr et al., 2007; Vaughan, 2007, 2008). To our knowledge, this is the first effort to describe the CofP model in relation to intimate discourse.

3.2 Intimate discourse and the dimensions of a community of practice Wenger (1998) identifies three crucial dimensions of a CofP: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. The dimensions are presented graphically here in Figure 3.1 as three interlocking cogs as ‘in the spirit of the [community of practice] itself, they are mutually dependent, inseparable from one another when it comes to their explication’ (Meyerhoff, 2004: 527). Wenger (1998) maintains that all these criteria must be fulfilled in order that we can talk about a group as a community of practice. In the discussion that follows, we will firstly discuss our interpretation of the essence of these criteria

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 51

mutual engagement

•doing things together •relaonships •community maintenance

joint enterprise •negoated •mutual accountability

shared repertoire

•stories, styles, artefacts, tools, discourses, historical events

Figure 3.1 Dimensions of a community of practice (adapted from Wenger, 1998)

and, in the discussion of corpus methodology and tools that follows, begin the process of operationalising them in order that we might uncover the linguistic practices that characterise communities of couples, family and close friends. 3.2.1 Mutual engagement Mutual engagement between members of a community of practice involves regular interaction – members must meet on a one-to-one basis or in small or large groups on a casual, intensive and comprehensive basis in order to qualify as a CofP (Holmes and Meyerhoff, 1999). As we have already discussed in Chapter 1, an identifying characteristic of intimate speaker relationships is co-habitation and this affords all members the opportunity for frequent interaction. Therefore, intimate groupings interact on the levels required for them to be considered as functioning CofPs. In terms of intimate discourse, Wenger (1998: 74) notes that ‘for a family, [mutual engagement] can be having dinner together, taking trips on weekends, or cleaning the house on Saturdays’ and many of these typical examples of mutual engagement in the family are represented linguistically in the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT). In relation to couples and community of practice, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992: 483) state that a marriage ‘creates a persistent community of practice typically involving a rich array of couple-specific practices.’ A couple may interact casually as their paths cross at various points during their day-to-day contact, intensively, for example when they discuss a specific problem or comprehensively when more general issues such as work are raised around the dinner table. This interaction is essential to community maintenance. Giles and Fitzpatrick (1984) point out

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that it is through interaction that married partners construct a shared reality and ‘subsequently define their identities.’ Cheal (2008: 16) notes that intimates use conversation to ‘deepen their intimacy and their sense of involvement with one another’. In contrast, according to Knapp and Vangelisti (2000: 335), ‘a breakdown in communication is one of the major forces that pulls relationships apart.’ Indeed, Gross (1980), in a study of separated spouses, reported that it was the ‘little conversations’ about everyday things that couples missed. It is interesting to note for the study of intimate discourse that Wenger (1998) argues that mutual engagement can be either harmonious or conflictual. Talk creates the intimate CofP, an idea akin to, albeit in a different context-type, Drew and Heritage’s (1992) notion that talk creates the institution (this, we realise, has echoes of Groucho Marx’ claim that ‘marriage is a wonderful institution but who wants to live in an institution?’). Our next step is to exemplify what mutual engagement might look like linguistically. Mutual engagement is evident in the following Extract (3.2) where a couple are doing things together (one of Wenger’s component parts of mutual engagement in Figure 3.1), putting up some shelves.

(3.2) [Couple assembling shelves; = male, = female] We can what d’you think of waxing it? Nah I like it as it is. Do you well no waxing wouldn= wouldn’t change the colour it would just preserve be like the table. Oh yeah. Um. I’ve no objection moral or otherwise to the use of wax is that the stuff you use on your legs+ laughter Feck off. +on your beard. laughter Just keep an eye on that there. In this extract, we see a couple engaged in the collaborative task (cf. McCarthy, 1998) of assembling furniture; a task that can, on occasion, prove to be a little fractious. We see that humour is being used to positive effect in this engagement when the male suggests to the female partner that they wax the shelf with the same wax she uses on her legs (or, indeed, beard). Section (3.3) demonstrates that laughter is ‘key’ in intimate discourse – therefore, it may be that laughter plays an important role in the practice of intimate CofPs in that it helps to maintain harmonious social relationships between couples, family and close friends (see also Chapter 4). As an aside, we might say that humour functions to maintain relations in all contexts, however, corpus linguistics provides us with the methodology that

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 53 allows us to empirically demonstrate the prominence of this discoursal feature in intimate communities of practice (the analysis of humour is, however, dependent on the transcription conventions adopted (see Section 2.3)). Extract (3.2) also embodies another of Wenger’s (1998) components of mutual engagement – community maintenance. Wenger argues that community maintenance is often ‘undervalued or even totally unrecognised’ (p. 75) and cites personality traits such as generosity and dedication as evidence of mutual engagement between participants with much in common in their respective backgrounds. Therefore, we can argue for the criticality of humour’s community maintenance function. 3.2.2 Joint enterprise As we have already mentioned, mutual engagement involves members of a community of practice getting together. The joint enterprise criterion of the community relates to the purpose for which they get together. The negotiation of joint enterprise has emerged as critical to the consideration of any CofP as it embodies the practice element of the community. To say that members of the CofP are invested in a meaningful, jointly negotiated enterprise is to say that these members share a number of goals. However, these goals are part of a negotiated, circular process – ‘members get together for some purpose and this purpose is defined through their pursuit of it’ (Meyerhoff, 2004: 528). A couple’s goal when they first meet might be interpersonal, for example, to discover one another’s values and beliefs. However, as the relationship evolves, these goals can change to more instrumental ones such as financial or family planning aspects. Their linguistic practices also change to reflect this; for example, initially their language practices will revolve around establishing a relationship and later, their language use will centre on the need to fulfil instrumental goals while at the same time maintaining, hopefully, a harmonious, intimate relationship. The process of the negotiation and renegotiation of goals reflects the members’ understanding of their personal roles within the relationship and is characteristic of a Cof P. Wenger (1998: 188) notes: Each member of a couple, for instance, may identify very deeply with their being a couple. They may also be viewed and identified as a couple by all their friends and relatives. It may be an unquestionable part of who they are. Yet there may still be substantial argument about what it means to be a couple as a way of living together, and who can determine at any time how being a couple is to be implemented. Therefore, each member of a couple is accountable for determining their bond with one another and their position within the relationship, essentially what it means to them to be a couple. This dimension of their relationship ‘contributes in its own right to shaping the kind of identity that belonging to that couple will produce’ (Wenger, 1998: 188). Extract (3.3) is taken from the sitcom Friends and features a couple, Richard and Monica. Monica raises the issue of their shared couple practice of always sleeping in his apartment.

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

(3.3) Richard: Um we should go too I got patients at eight in the morning. Monica: You know I was thinking. You know how we always stay at your apartment? Well, I thought maybe tonight we’d stay at my place. Richard: I don’t know, I don’t have my jammies. Monica: Well, maybe you don’t need them. (The One where Doctor Ramoray Dies, Friends, Series 2, Episode 18) Here we can see that a couple’s identity can be shaped even by where they sleep. Richard wants to sleep in his house because he is comfortable there in his jammies. However, Monica wants to renegotiate this comfortable identity suggesting that there is something more in store for him should they stay in her apartment where his pyjamas will not be necessary. In relation to the mutual understanding of personal roles within the family CofP, in the family, roles such as youngest son or mother are pre-established, stable and hierarchic, and the understanding of these roles is learned by the children through a process of legitimate peripheral participation in the practices of the family. These roles remain a defining feature of the family CofP, even as the children enter adulthood. Turner and West (2006: 221) maintain that negotiating closeness is a family’s primary task and ‘it is never ending’. This enables the CofP to survive, even when, as Wenger (1998: 6) points out ‘families fall apart’. 3.2.3 Shared repertoire The final dimension of the CofP is shared repertoire. Shared repertoire refers to any resource, linguistic or otherwise, that has emerged from the joint pursuit of an enterprise to become of the community’s practice (Wenger, 1998). Therefore, a CofP’s shared repertoire can contain resources like pictures, regular meals, and gestures (Holmes and Meyerhoff, 1999). Our focus here is on the linguistic channel as the conversations were audiotaped with no researcher present to make fieldnotes etc. Therefore, in terms of shared repertoire, we are concerned with the linguistic patterns that speakers have developed in their various communities. A shared linguistic repertoire contains resources such as jargon, shared stories, inside jokes or metaphor and extralinguistic resources such as laughter. In terms of an intimate community of practice, close friends can draw on shared histories to point to shared points of reference such as the episode invoked by Do you remember…? (in bold) in Extract (3.3).

(3.3) [Friends chatting at home] I know when we went to Paris and she just started er really it was all about the boiler and that wasn’t it about the boiler and do you remember and that missus er what was her name can’t remember her name.

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 55





Oh yeah. That French name . Oh yeah. But she couldn’t sort it out herself could she you know. Sure she couldn’t buy her knickers without having somebody along. I know. She was just the world’s worst.

In Extract (3.3), although the speakers cannot remember the name of the person they are talking about, their shared knowledge is such that they do not actually need to. The shared story they reference about going to Paris is sufficient for them to be able to comment (not very favourably) on another’s personality. Becker (1994: 165) points out that ‘social groups appear to be bound primarily by a shared repertoire of prior texts’ and that these texts can be either public, for example, media texts, or intensely private such as in Extract (3.3). Bellah et al. (1985) note that shared family stories function to bind members together in ‘communities of memory’, through creating links between past, present and future. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992: 483) refer to language as key in the CofP ‘central to developing the ways of thinking and doing that give communities of practice their character.’ Shared repertoire provides the richest vein for the researcher due to the fact that it is the most obvious link to linguistic practices. However, it should always be considered in light of the other two dimensions, mutual engagement and joint enterprise. Now, our attention turns toward blending the CofP model with a corpus methodology in order that we might present our model for unearthing the linguistic patterns that colour our understanding of intimate CofPs.

3.3 A corpus linguistic approach to operationalising the community of practice At this point we turn our attention to how our examination of intimate discourse can benefit from the integration of the concept of community of practice with a corpus methodology. King (2014: 61 [abstract]) argues that when determining whether or not an aggregate of people constitute a functioning community of practice, ‘the nature of the measuring stick is a vital question.’ In our case, our measuring stick is the evidence that a corpus methodology allows us to uncover. As we discussed in Chapter 2, corpus linguistics (CL) is, broadly speaking, the use of language corpora, coupled with a specific set of methods, to study patterns of language variation and use (Biber et al., 1999; McEnery and Hardie, 2012). A corpus is a principled collection of texts stored on a computer for electronic analysis (see McEnery and Wilson, 1996; Kennedy, 1998; Biber et al., 1999; McEnery et al., 2006). Although there are arguments about whether CL constitutes a theory in and of itself (see Tognini-Bonelli, 2001), a corpus methodology has a number of characteristics that are of benefit to the community of practice model.

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

•

Modern spoken corpora often contain large amounts of naturally-occurring data – in this instance, we can investigate the possibilities of operationalising the dimensions of the CofP through consulting a corpus of more than 500,000 words; Corpora are designed to be representative – that is, a corpus is a specific sample of language that is typical of language use in general; A corpus is analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively resulting in a highly iterative process; A corpus methodology is extremely adaptable – CL has been blended with many different approaches to linguistic analysis such as Conversation Analysis (see, for example, Walsh, 2013), pragmatics (Clancy and O’Keeffe, 2015), Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker et al., 2008), sociolinguistics (Andersen, 2010) or genre analysis (Koester, 2006).

• • •

In terms of studies that illustrate the benefits of a blend of CL and community of practice, Holmes et al. (1999) utilise a series of detailed interactional sequences taken from a corpus of over 300 interactions collected in four New Zealand government workplaces. This allowed them to identify a representative sample, supported by detailed ethnographic information, that they used to explore how workplace managers ‘do power’. They illustrated a range of linguistic patterns and strategies used by superiors. Of particular interest to the community of practice, is their finding that managers use different linguistic patterns with established colleagues than they do with new ones. In another corpus study of the workplace community of practice, Vaughan (2007) employs word frequency lists to demonstrate English language teachers’ use of a shared linguistic repertoire to talk about students. She maintains that mastery of repertoire demonstrates their full membership of their community of practice. For example, despite there being a range of other options available to them, the most frequent words used to talk about students’ ability in English are the rather vague adjectives good and weak. Vaughan maintains that these terms belie the complex nature of the shared professional knowledge between English language teachers. Only through access to shared practices can teachers unpack what good means and how this differs from, for example, really good. Vaughan and Clancy (2013) also blend community of practice and corpus linguistics in order to demonstrate how notions of community and identity are made linguistically manifest. Concentrating on the frequency of the pronoun we across two corpora representing two distinct communities of practice – a family and a workplace – they use normalised word frequency (see below) to demonstrate that we is more than twice as frequent in the workplace represented in the study than in the family. They reason for this is, they suggest, the nature of the communities themselves. The family constructs its identity ‘through explicitly identifying the out-groups that contrast with the core in-group’ (p. 69), whereas members of the workplace, who do not share the same degree of closeness as the family, similarly utilise we both to define the parameters of the community but also to index complex politeness routines.

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 57 This is not to say that there are no disadvantages attached to the use of a corpus methodology. For example, although metadata such as age, gender or level of education is frequently available from modern spoken corpus databases, the detailed information needed to identify, say, non-linguistic artefacts and practices that characterise communities of practice is often not retrievable, although multi-modal corpora have begun to address this.1 In addition, many spoken corpora are not prosodically annotated and, therefore, studies that utilise prosodic features as indicators of community membership (for example, Eckert, 2000) are, at present, not replicable using many larger corpora. There are, however, some exceptions to this such as the freely-available Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and London Lund Corpus of Spoken English, the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English or SPICE-Ireland, a prosodically and pragmatically annotated version of the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (see Kallen and Kirk, 2012). Corpus linguistics, we argue, allows us to operationalise mutual engagement, jointly negotiated enterprise and shared repertoire through an analysis of the language in use in LINT. However, we should also note that the benefits offered by corpus linguistics to community of practice is not a one-way street. Meyerhoff (2004: 538–539) argues that a major advantage of attention to the concept of the CofP is ‘it restores an emphasis on relating large-scale quantitative analysis to the micro-level practices of the groups of speakers being studied.’ To date, research that blends corpus linguistics with sociolinguistic research has largely been concerned with linguistic variation at broad macrosocial levels such as region, gender, social class or age. Community of practice provides us with an alternative to this norm through an analysis of small group practices which challenges assumptions or misconceptions that might be associated with these macro-social variables (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992). A community of practice approach enables a two-tiered analysis where, for example, age or gender are considered in tandem with social relationships or shared goals, variables that do not exist independently of one another. In short, it allows us to re-establish the link between the individual and the large, homogeneous groups that have been the subject of much corpus sociolinguistic research. Eckert (2000: 222) maintains that the goal of community of practice research is not to ‘dispense with global categories, but to attach them to personal and community experiences in such a way that the structure of variation makes everyday sense.’ The focus on criteria such as membership and practice elucidates ties between these abstract social categories and the social groups that people are members of on an everyday basis (Eckert, 2000; Meyerhoff, 2004) and, thereby, broadens the scope of corpus research in the area of sociolinguistics. With this in mind, we will now explore the corpus tools that we will utilise to operationalise community of practice in the analysis chapters. We will begin, as so many corpus linguists do, with word frequency and keyword lists. Our attention will then turn to the use of concordance lines and collocation in corpus analysis.

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

3.3.1 Word frequency lists The first corpus linguistic method of analysis that we will focus on is the word frequency list. These lists are generated quite quickly by corpus linguistic software programmes.2 A word frequency list, in general, appears visually as a list of all the types3 in a corpus (highest frequency first), coupled with the number of occurrences of each type (Frequency column) as demonstrated in Table 3.1. Table 3.1 demonstrates that the most frequent type in the Limerick Corpus of Intimate Talk (LINT) is the with 16,725 occurrences, followed by I with 15,284 and so on. We often use word frequency lists as entry points into the data given that they can highlight phenomena distinct from an instinctive norm that warrant further investigation (see, for example, Tognini-Bonelli, 2001; Baker, 2006). This enables the identification of items that may be characteristic of a particular variety, genre or context. For example, in Table 3.2, the most frequent 25 words in the intimate context-type are compared to those in the four other discourse contexts in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) – socialising, professional, pedagogic and transactional (items of particular note are shaded and in bold). These lists highlight a variety of features that illustrate both similarities and differences between the intimate context-type and the four other contexts of use in LCIE: Table 3.1 The top 25 most frequent words in LINT N

Word

Frequency

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

the I you and it to yeah a that in like was of is he know no she oh on do there what but they

16,725 15,284 13,926 12,022 11,632 10,178 9,664 9,456 6,960 6,949 6,942 6,726 5,954 5,558 5,308 5,202 4,810 4,279 4,122 3,905 3,835 3,816 3,803 3,730 3,696

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 59 Table 3.2 The 25 most frequent words in each of the five spoken discourse context-types in LCIE N

Intimate

Socialising

Professional

Pedagogical

Transactional

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

the I you and it to yeah a that in like was of is he know no she oh on do there what but they

the and I to a you that it of on in they yeah was come is now we have there know do but would like

the and I to you that a yeah it of in is they was know on for we there have but be so what do

the and you to of that I a it in is so was have they we yeah tis what but are be okay know for

the and to I a of you that in it ah is was we they have for on be but know there am are it’s

•

•

• •

In terms of the rank order of the personal pronouns I and you, the intimate context-type shows a similar pattern to the other context-types in that I is more frequent than you. The exception to this is pedagogical discourse, where you is more frequent than I; The third person singular pronouns he and she occur on the intimate frequency list but are absent from the top 25 words in the other context-types. In contrast, the first and third person plural pronouns we and they are present on the socialising, professional, pedagogical and transactional lists but only they occurs on the intimate list; Yeah, a common response token and discourse marker in spoken English, features on four of the five lists (it does not occur in transactional) whereas intimate is the only list that contains the item no (position 17); A marker strongly associated with pragmatic marking in informal spoken Irish English, like, features on the intimate sub-corpus frequency list. The only other context-type it appears in is socialising (position 25 on the list). In contrast, know, another item connected with pragmatic marking (in relation to the chunk you know), appears on all 5 lists.

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

For the researcher, the frequency findings in Table 3.2 offer our first insights into the distinctiveness of an intimate CofP that we will more fully explore in the analysis chapters. For example, the occurrence of the pronouns he and she on the intimate word frequency list might be attributed to invoking the ‘wider world’ outside the immediate context through the sub-register of narrative (Rühlemann, 2007). This may point towards a topic of talk, stories or accounts concerning conversational participants themselves or other people known to them, within intimate communities of practice. Of note here is that Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1999) flag topics of talk as characteristic of a community of practice. The frequency lists in Table 3.2 also show that the first and third person plural pronouns we and they appear to be more frequent in the other context-types than in intimate discourse. Rühlemann (2007: 71) notes that we is more frequent in context-governed discourse (such as pedagogic, professional or transactional discourse) because ‘maintaining group identity is one of the underlying principle concerns.’ The intimate, transactional, pedagogic and transactional sub-corpora of LCIE have different word counts, therefore, in order that we might compare word frequency in these context-types, it is necessary to normalise the frequency results. Normalised frequency (nf) can be achieved by using a simple calculation as demonstrated by Biber (1988). If we want to normalise per 500,000 words, for example, the calculation is as follows. of occurrences nf = number total number of words × 500,000

The normalised frequencies for we in both the professional and intimate subcorpora of LCIE are calculated below. This process of normalisation will be employed throughout the analysis chapters. nf for we (professional) = 1169 × 500,000 = 4151.45 140794 2341 nf for we (intimate) = × 500,000 = 2140.08 546,940

Using this formula we can see that we is nearly twice as frequent in the professional discourse in LCIE as it is in the intimate discourse. It may be that in intimate communities of practice, there is a mutual recognition that group identity is a pre-existing concept that is maintained due to the nature of the speaker relationships. Therefore, as we will further explore in Chapter 4, intimate discourse may well have developed a shared way of engaging, with a repertoire that does not include the frequent use of we. Similarly, like, an item commonly associated with pragmatic marking in Irish English, occurs 6,346 times per 500,000 words in intimate discourse but only 1,768 per 500,000 in transactional discourse

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 61 when the frequency counts are normalised. This highlights that the marker might be worth examining in the LINT corpus, a point we return to again in Chapter 5. In addition, as we will see below, like also features prominently on the LINT keyword list. 3.3.2 Keyword lists The second corpus technique that we will examine is the keyword list. These lists differ from word frequency lists in a number of important ways. Key words are words that occur with unusual frequency or ‘keyness’ when one corpus is compared to another. Using corpus software it is possible to identify keywords whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison to a reference corpus. A reference corpus is, usually, a larger corpus, such as the British National Corpus or the Corpus of Contemporary American English (see Chapter 6), which acts as a baseline for comparison. In order to generate a keyword list, you first generate a word frequency list from both your target corpus and the reference corpus. The computer software then calculates the statistical significance of difference between the two using chi-square or log-likelihood tests. This distinguishes between frequencies that are a matter of chance, and those that ‘are likely to be motivated by some characteristic of the communicative event’ (Anderson and Corbett, 2009: 37). Due to the statistical nature of the list, keywords are, according to Baker (2006), indicative of saliency as opposed to only providing frequency. Spoken keyword lists generally contain three types of words: high frequency grammatical words such as I, and, that or of, proper nouns, and ‘aboutness’ words. Aboutness words (after Phillips (1989)) are, according to Scott and Tribble (2006: 58) ‘words that are important to the text and indicative of its meaning, what it is about.’ For example, they generated a keyword list for Romeo and Juliet using all of Shakespeare’s plays as a reference corpus. They found that the list contained words that characterise what the play is about, such as love, lips, death and poison, but also surprising or odd words on the keyword list such as the exclamations Ah and O, the verbs art and wilt and the pronouns thou and she. They maintain that these items suggest something about the style of the text – for example, they note that art frequently occurs with thou and are indicative of the intimate nature of the play. Table 3.3 Table 3.3 The top 20 keywords in LINT (BNC spoken as reference corpus) N 1 2 3 4 5

Keywords # X E G H (Continued)

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

Table 3.3 (Continued) N

Keywords

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

like you’re ya shure laughing yeah laughs laughter am ah muffled ye em goin she

illustrates the top 20 keywords in the LINT corpus with the spoken component of the BNC as the reference corpus.4 We can make a number of initial observations about the LINT corpus on examination of this keyword list. • •

•

The first is that X, E, G and H (occupying positions 2–5) are used as transcription annotation and so are indicative of LINT as a spoken corpus rather than indications of saliency or aboutness; The items laughing, laughs, laughter and muffled are present on the keyword list because they have been marked as extralinguistic information in the corpus transcriptions. The fact that laughter appears as key in the intimate context-type is an interesting finding and worthy of more investigation (see Chapter 4); The pronouns ya and ye (you singular and plural respectively in Irish English) and the marker shure are, perhaps, evidence that LINT is a corpus of the language variety Irish English.

More importantly for this corpus study, Table 3.3 also provides some statistical support for the frequency list findings in Table 3.2 in that it highlights like (position 6), yeah (position 11) and she (position 20) as key in the LINT corpus and these items will be further explored in the analysis chapters. Scott and Tribble (2006) argue words such as like are not indicative of aboutness as they are too indefinite and general. This raises the question as to what conversation in the intimate context-type is ‘about’, given the absence of any item with a dictionary meaning in Table 3.3. Therefore, in order to explore more in relation to the ‘aboutness’ of the intimate CofP, we can omit the high frequency grammatical words, such as she,

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 63 and transcription features such as the speaker or extralinguistic tags from Table 3.3. This gives us an alternative view of LINT in Table 3.4. In terms of operationalising intimate communities of practice using corpus linguistic methods, Table 3.4 adds more weight to the findings from Table 3.2. We can see that address terms such as kinship terms (mammy), familiarisers (lads) and full first name proper nouns (Sinead) are prominent in the intimate context, and highlight another area we will return to in the analysis chapters. Scott and Tribble (2006: 70) attribute the prominence of address terms on the Romeo and Juliet keyword list to ‘dealing with a play, where characters are especially important to the overall purpose, and where each character relates intensely to the others.’ In doing so, Scott and Tribble have, essentially, described our everyday interaction with partners, family and friends. Further richness is added to the context-type by the presence of locations such as Limerick, Cork and Dublin for this drama to unfold. Table 3.4 also demonstrates that the intimate discourse contained in LINT is further characterised by the presence of taboo language items such as Jesus, fuckin and God. This again may indicate the level of informality that characterises the context-type and we will return to the use of taboo language in Chapter 7. Items that are related to the interpersonal domain are also evident; like, shure,5 kind, now and kinda function as interpersonal markers and these will also be explored when our attention turns to discussion of these in Chapter 6. Finally, there are some open-set lexical items such as night and Table 3.4 LINT keywords with transcription features and high frequency grammatical items removed (BNC spoken as reference corpus) N

Keywords

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

like shure grand Jesus Limerick mammy lads fuckin anyway know night Cork kind now Dublin fella match kinda Sinead God

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A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse

match present. Scott and Tribble (2006) maintain that it is items such as these that really characterise what a text is about. Therefore, these lexical items may point towards conversational topics in LINT. We have already mentioned that Scott and Tribble (2006) consider what they refer to as ‘oddities’ or ‘intruders’ on keyword lists as items indicative of the style of the text. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1999) maintain that style, including speech style, is crucial to the development of many communities of practice. Meyerhoff (2004: 534) points out that ‘linguistic style is part and parcel of speaker’s work to construct a social identity (or identities), which is meaningful to themselves and others.’ Tannen (2005: 14), in reference to conversational style between friends, defines conversational style as the linguistics choices speaker’s make – be they phonological, lexical, syntactic or prosodic – that characterise a person’s personality. These choices ‘determine the effect of an utterance in interaction and influence judgements that are made both about what is said and about the speaker who says it … style is not something extra added on like frosting on a cake. It is the stuff of which the linguistic cake is made.’ In relation to the intimate cake, the context is not characterised by a large range of open-set lexical items in the same way as, for example, professional or pedagogical discourse (see, for example, O’Keeffe et al. (2007: 209)), but instead features a number of interpersonal markers such as pronouns, address terms and pragmatic markers as both frequent and key. This reflects, amongst other things, the high degree of shared knowledge amongst intimates which results in a community of practice where inexplicitness is the norm. Intimate communities of practice are ‘about’ invoking a shared history in order to maintain relationships that have been built and tended to over a long period of time. Items such as like, mammy, laughter or she are as important to this as words that have a definite lexical meaning. N

.----b.--4----

oncordance are your_ s . Here Richard i~ that our~ . They're not mine no I don't think I have any socks no 1_just . Jesus Mary you can Race tt's called . Wee bit of shak1ng under the wheel_s John no? Huh? There's a wee bit of shaking un~er the wheels .

·-4- to work ah for six of seven euro wherever . Is there anyone else 1n here no? I don't know . Background people talkmg ·--+-- and everything . Were you out some night with some strange girl no? laughs That's what I was kinda I kind of .---4-·---4-_ 7_ _ 8_ 9 .~

.__g._

._g._

.~ .~ .~

.....!!__

an hour of it here but then to go home and transcribe the fuckin thing idea . No no . Let's rock . . Cos then off chance that it might be something worth buying . And there's now? Because why not there's no point putting it on when there's talking about it though I'd say they might . shop . ~S01 ~ That's about five I th~ught someone sa1d they were 1~ _Skibbe~een . Well she said all m a tizzy over the orgams1ng of _rt + Oh on my way home from wexford nl be there 1n a half an hour or so . Oh Very good at what he does . he's the eldest boy . months ago that i"d be engaged by now . Oh so terrible . It's still thirty Euros . Do you want anything to eat . Oh what you mean it went to Wednesday night that . no no no no no . I had this conversation with my mother now . bear . Yeah have you been in contact with Brid? No . want to bring that down? Yeah Do you need it? form . Ale you a member of any professional organisation? person . MNottingham is the seat ·+ Robin Hood . they're gas aren't they . Do you want a drink are you sure? on . It's only the only thing that'll save you in a car . other ways am I like her? I'm certainly not as set in my ways .

no way . Ah you should tape Hugh GAA first and then Shane no.onewiU be able to see our beautiful faces . no way I'd give them my Visa card number either . What if worst no people here . Huh? I don't know but rm guessing . No Brian Charlotte that's tomorrow . When people have a no I I after what they did t_ o me the last time . It was you no they're not they're over 1n+ They were 1n Coolagh an~ay . no ~hey'd be very organised now . +they they'll enJOY I= no 1m on my way out no I am ah tm coming up near Delaneys the No the second one . the second one . Yeah . No it's not i'm going out more now than what I ever did going out with No, I'm okay . Do you want more tea? No . We do No no when the clock changes back and hour in the ev= No no no no no . No if Sabrina couldn't have kids or one of my No. No not at all Carla do you what's been unbelievable since I No not for another while . I can't find What ? No but I will be doing y'know I you know the Marketing No Prince John . laughing laughing No thanks . Any mugs? Yeah just up there . They're No I'm . aam what day is it No no no . Or I wouldn't be as domineering and wanting to be the

Figure 3.2 Random sample of 25 concordance lines with no as the search (or node) item in LINT

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse 65 3.3.3 Concordancing The process of generating concordance lines using computer software is central to the analysis of any corpus. As we have already seen, corpus analysis software allows us to search a corpus for a particular word, part of a word or phrase. What is characteristic of concordancing is that the search item, or node, is presented visually in the centre of a concordance line surrounded by a number of words on either side. Figure 3.2 illustrates an example of a random selection of 25 concordance lines for the search item no, an item we first encountered on the intimate frequency list in Table 3.1 (position 17). A concordance search for no in LINT generates over 4,500 lines which is far too many to show here. Therefore, these lines were reduced to a random sample of 25 using the menu option ‘Edit | Deleting | Reduce to N’ in WordSmith Tools. For the novice researcher, concordance lines can provide an interpretative challenge due to factors such as their visual appearance, their unsystematic presentation and their initial need to be read vertically rather than horizontally. Sinclair (2003: xvi–xvii) recommends a seven-step procedure for ‘uncovering the mysteries of most concordances’ (p. xvi) and these steps are presented in Figure 3.3. Sinclair’s (2003) first step, initiate, involves looking at the words that occur to the left and right of the search item in order to discover any distinctive, repeated patterns to use as a starting point. Therefore, examining Figure 3.2, a feature of note is that a speaker tag such as , , etc. frequently occurs as the first item to the left of no. This allows us to implement his second step, interpret, where we formulate a hypothesis based on our initial finding – we hypothesise that, for example, no often functions as a turn initial item in LINT. In order that we might consolidate (step 3) this, the computer allows us to re-sort the concordance lines in order that we might examine these patterns in more detail. Most concordancers allow us to re-sort the lines alphabetically up to five

Iniate

Repeat

Interpret

Consolidate

Result

Recycle

Report

Figure 3.3 Sinclair’s (2003) seven-step procedure for analysing concordance lines

66 N _ 1_ 2 3

·+

A new framework for the analysis of intimate discourse Concordance

Oh what you mean it person . MNottingham is gas aren't they . Do Yeah have you been

went to Wednesday night that . the seat •• Robin Hood . you want a drink are you sure? in contact with Brid? No .



No no when the clock changes back and hour in the No Prince John . laughing laughing No thanks . Any mugs? Yeah just up there . No . No not at all Carla do you what"s been unbelievable

.~ want to bring that down? Yeah