2 - Overview of the conversational corpus

Summary

This chapter presents a brief overview of the database and the distribution of adverbial clauses within it.

The data

The database includes thirteen naturally occurring telephone, face-to-face, two party, and multi-party conversations. None of the interaction originates from interview or data-elicitation formats. In this way, special turn-taking formats were avoided. Twelve of the conversations are audio taped, and one particularly long span of talk comes from a video taped multi-party conversation. All the data used for this study are transcribed according to the conventions of conversation analysis (CA). In each instance of an adverbial clause, I have done a careful analysis of intonation. In some cases, this has resulted in the addition of commas (level rising, incomplete intonation) or periods (final falling intonation) to the original transcriptions.

All the conversations are between adults, and all are in relatively casual situations: chatting on the phone, drinking beer on a picnic, visiting over crackers and cheese after a movie, or eating dinner. Eight of the recordings are of two-party telephone conversations, eliminating the question of non-verbal signaling for at least a portion of the data. Five of the conversations are face-to-face, multi-party interactions, in which the contribution of nonverbal cues will not be addressed in this study. There are a total of 33 different speakers in the conversations, 20 women and 13 men. The level of education of the participants has not been controlled for, although there is a preponderance of college-aged young people, as many of the recordings were originally collected for class assignments in CA courses.