Post 4: Transcribing multimodal interaction involving children

Ochs (1979) meant to present the theory-driven transcription innovation as “a first venture into a vast wilderness of research concerns.” Such a venture at that time was insightful and pioneering indeed. Ever since Saussure defined the inner language as the linguistic proper, the object worth researching for linguists, and dismissed the naturalistic speech behavior, which was later known as ‘performance’ as opposed to ‘competence’, as ephemeral and unstable, modern linguistics had mainly concerned itself with the native-speaker intuitions that help determine the grammaticality of context-free utterances. As a result, so much part of language and human communication had been reduced to oblivion until this narrow view of language was challenged. However, it is now anachronistic to blame Saussure and Chomsky (and their followers) for their limited interest scope. My point here is that in retrospect, one should marvel at how much our understanding of language and communication has evolved through the past half century. The ventures undertaken by scholars like Ochs foreshadowed and fueled the development of new branches within linguistics and other disciplines that focus on the multimodal nature of human communication.

In fact, the difficulty described in Ochs (1979) in transcribing interactions involving children reflects the very idea of multimodality, which basically assumes that representation and communication always draw on a multiplicity of modes, all of which contribute to meaning. One of the primary reasons that multiple modes are utilized in various ensemble is that no single mode can completely express any particular concept or meaning (Kress & Leeuwen, 2001, 2006; Kress, 2010). This is particular true with children’s communication, which is more complicated than we think and which always involves more than language, one among the many modes through which they fulfill their daily interactions. As researchers who choose to focus on the performance aspect of language, transcribing speech acts, usually coupled with and facilitated by a diverse range of situational clues, into readable print-based texts is really a challenge. The nature of the challenge is how we can transcribe one mode of expression successfully into another, or how we can strike a balance between authenticity and readability, as described in Ochs (1979):

“Ideally, we want our transcript to meet practical as well as theoretical considerations. We want our transcript to express the relation between non-verbal and verbal behavior as accurately as possible… On the other hand, we want a readable transcript, one that displays clearly and systematically utterances and contexts (p. 59).”

With this criterion, I can see Butler and Wilkinson (2013) from another perspective. (I had mixed these reading assignments and accidentally read this piece as one from last week.) Butler and Wilkinson have used what seems to be a biased mode of transcription in Ochs’ term—the top to bottom biases, to relive a Christmas family gathering that involves multi-party family interaction. In the extracts that captures the various scenes in which five-year-old Fredrick tries to navigate himself in the busy world of adults’ conversations, the little boy manages to mobilize recipiency from his addressees by various tricks, demonstrating his communicative competence despite the repeated suspension of his requests. The transcripts as I read anew seem to capture Fredrick’s lonely efforts by deeply embedding his utterances and actions into those of the adults, who are themselves indulged in talking to each other. My physical attempt to follow Fredrick, the true subject of this research was to highlight those speech acts of his to single him out from the bewildering tangle of those of the adults, which in this case serves as the background. This way of representation nevertheless agrees with one of the purpose of this research: to examine the notion of children’s rights to speak or engage in interaction. In turn, this agrees with what Ochs admits in her article that exactly what and in what way to present by transcription vary situationally.      

References (besides our readings)

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold. 

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.