Narrative, however, could as well be seen as an a priori genre for the organization of interaction, and many instances of talk would reflect polygeneric blending.
DEBATE
Blommaert: Narrative, interaction or both 1
Narrative, interaction, or both
Discourse Studies Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications. (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com Vol 9(6): 000–000 10.1177/1461445607082583
JAN BLOMMAERT I N S T I T U T E O F E D U C AT I O N , U N I V E R S I T Y O F L O N D O N
These comments focus on issues of genre in transcription ABSTRACT formats. Bucholtz’s paper takes conversation to be the a priori organizational genre of everyday talk, following a long line of interactional and conversational studies. Narrative, however, could as well be seen as an a priori genre for the organization of interaction, and many instances of talk would reflect polygeneric blending. This form of blending should be reflected in transcription practices, so that we can do justice to variation in talk by means of variation in transcription procedures. KEY WORDS:
conversation, methodology, narrative, transcription
Mary Bucholtz’s article to an already substantial oeuvre of critical reflections on transcription and related entextualization practices in discourse analysis, and it thus adds substance to the literature that seeks to deepen the theoretical and methodological foundations of a branch of science that relies on representations of text. It goes, in other words, right to the heart of our disciplinary apparatus, and it cuts into the ironic issue that we have to use artefactualized simulacra of lived language in order to be able to study it. The problems engendered by this irony are here not de-problematized, but turned into a productive theme: from distortion to variation. A whole new space of issues is thereby opened for exploration, and all of us should welcome this effort. In what follows, I would like to join Bucholtz in her effort by suggesting one such issue – an issue that remains slightly underdeveloped in her article but of which I am sure that she is aware. The issue is that of narrative versus conversational genre a priori in transcription, and the way in which they cause particular problems, theoretical as well as ethical ones. In her comments on orthographic variation, Bucholtz advocates a synergy between conversation analysis and variationist sociolinguistics. The direction of
2
Discourse Studies 9(6)
this synergy is from variationist sociolinguistics to conversation analysis: sociolinguistics could enrich us ‘by providing the tools for the analysis of phonological variation as a phenomenon of potential significance in moment-to-moment interaction’. A better, more fine-grained analysis of conversational dynamics is also illustrated in the Ava-and-Bee example she gives, and ideally, ‘a natural next step (. . .) would be interdisciplinary collaboration between phonologists beginning to examine connected discourse in real-world contexts and conversation analysis interested in the role of pronunciation in interaction’. Rampton (2006) would be an excellent example of such synergy, and Rampton’s focus on microscopic phonetic shifts in interaction indeed illuminates the delicate identity work that is done by speakers. An improved and deepened understanding of ‘interaction’ is the main drive in this article, and ‘interaction’ is converted into ‘conversation’. This of course has effects on transcription: the basic format for representing speech will be as conversation, and not, for instance, as interactionally organized narrative. The question is: why would the basic generic format for human interaction be conversation? And why would the default artefactualized replica of human interaction have to be a conversational transcript, with all its implicit and explicit encodings of genre features? In other words: shouldn’t we consider – and be more careful about – genre and the way genres are played out from a repertoire into an activity, when we take decisions about transcription formats? Thus: couldn’t we extend the comments made by Bucholtz on her own early transcripts which imposed a formatting aimed at ‘discourse contents’ onto the data, to include similar a priori formatting decisions aimed at ‘conversation’ as an essential organizing feature? In my own work on asylum seekers’ discourses, our main data consisted of recorded conversations between Belgian researchers and mainly African asylum seekers. The conversations were often organized around narratives, both protracted and elaborate ones as well as micro-narratives, short bursts of narrative framed in a conversational pattern of dialogue. Analysing such data, we found that a) the conversational elements often occurred as co-narration – a very Sacksian phenomenon, yet conventionally treated not as narrative but as conversation; b) that a conversational transcript did not explain adequately what happened in terms of function and effect in that conversation. We thus had to devise transcription formats that blended conversational patterns, narrative patterns, and very often also phonetic patterns, since narrative-stylistic shifts often involved linguistic shifts as well (see Blommaert, 2005; Maryns and Blommaert, 2001). This blend of transcription formulae emerged out of an attempt to avoid imposing a mono-generic frame onto our data: conversation and narrative were one form of action that required a representation that did justice to both – and that highlighted the fact that narrative patterns could not be reduced to conversational ones. Even more: the conversations, while obviously ‘regular’ in a conversation-analytic sense, appeared to be dominated by what Hymes (1996) called ‘a narrative view of life’: the participants’ central concern was the production – interactionally negotiated – of a story (or multiple) stories,
Blommaert: Narrative, interaction or both 3
and the aesthetics of storytelling (its ‘ethnopoetics’, to continue the Hymesian terminology) featured heavily in the production of talk. Most of what people produce in the way of talk is polygeneric; it blends storytelling with every other form of human interactional genre. One concern in the study of talk should therefore be to construct representations of such talk that reflects this blending, and reflect the different conventions that organize the constituent parts. This will, to be sure, result in ‘hybrid’ and less glib transcripts than the ones that follow Jeffersonian or Schegloffian conventions. But these may be transcripts that tell us more about talk, and tell it in what Hymes would call a ‘democratic’ way (1996: 14): a way that reflects the delicate and complex voices of the people we study. I take it that Bucholtz would see such a move as one that does justice to variation in talk by means of variation in transcription practices. REFERENCES
Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, D. (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis. Maryns, K. and Blommaert, J. (2001) ‘Stylistic and Thematic Shifting as a Narrative Resource: Assessing Asylum Seekers’ Repertoires’, Multilingua 20: 61–84. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
is Professor and Chair of Languages in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and Professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Ghent University. His main publications include Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Language Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999) and Debating Diversity (Routledge, 1998).
JAN BLOMMAERT
