Basic transcription notation conventions

You'll see a certain variety of notation symbols in CA, but the great majority will be based on
what is often called the "Jefferson system" after its developer, Gail Jefferson. There is a
comprehensive account in Atkinson and Heritage, and more abbreviated accounts in the
books by Hutchby and Wooffitt, and ten Have.

The list below is fairly representative of the most widely-used symbols.

You might also like to look at the symbols explained page in the 'Transcript' section of this
tutorial. It gives a more specific account of the symbols as I used them in arriving at a
reasonable transcript of the audio and video clips.

(.) Just noticeable pause

(.3), (2.6) Examples of timed pauses
word,word Onset of noticeable pitch rise or fall (can be difficult to use reliably)
Square brackets aligned across adjacent lines denote the start of
A: word [word
overlapping talk. Some transcribers also use "]" brackets to show where
B: [word
the overlap stops
.hh, hh in-breath (note the preceding fullstop) and out-breath respectively.
wo(h)rd (h) is a try at showing that the word has "laughter" bubbling within it
wor- A dash shows a sharp cut-off
wo:rd Colons show that the speaker has stretched the preceding sound.
(words) A guess at what might have been said if unclear
Unclear talk. Some transcribers like to represent each syllable of unclear
( )
talk with a dash
The equals sign shows that there is no discernible pause between two
A: word=
speakers' turns or, if put between two sounds within a single speaker's
B: =word
turn, shows that they run together
word, WORD Underlined sounds are louder, capitals louder still
word material between "degree signs" is quiet
>word word<
Inwards arrows show faster speech, outward slower
<word word>

Analyst's signal of a significant line

Transcriber's go at representing something hard, or impossible, to write

((sobbing))
phonetically

Analysis example 1: "The camera's on"

What does it mean to remark on what is obviously the case, as Zoe does when she states, flatly,
that "the camera's on"?

Here's that section of the transcript again (I'm using Transcript 4, without all the red text or the
explanation of the symbols; click on notation if you need to jog your memory of what the symbols
mean).

17 (6.0)
18 Zoe th' camera's on.
19 Lyn >yes<
20 (1.8)
21 Zoe w'(h) are you ta(h)lking to it while you
22 wORK?
23 Lyn no:,
24 (.5)
25 Lyn [heh heh heh heh=
26 Zoe [hh what ye' DOINg then
27 Lyn =hahh hahh hahh
28 (1.0)
29 Zoe what's the point:h
30 (1.5)
31 Zoe oh god (.) look what I'm wearing

Noticing.

We might be guided by something already known to CA - that making a remark with no 'news'
value whatsoever can have specific interactional consequences.

Look at this example, in which the caller 'notices' that the receiver's line's been busy.

(from Pomerantz, 1980)

1 [phone rings]
2 Receiver Hello::
3 Caller HI:::
4 Receiver Oh:hi:: 'ow are you Agne::s
5 Caller Fine. Yer line's been busy
6 Receiver Yeuh my fu(hh) - 'hhh my father's
7 wife called me [...etc..]

Caller says 'yer line's been busy' - but that can hardly be news to the receiver, who is presumably
just the person responsible. What is interesting is that the caller's remark prompts the receiver to
give an account of why the line was indeed busy.

In line 6, the receiver responds to caller's line 4 as if it had been an explicit request for an
explanation of why the line had been busy. The caller's "noticing", then, has worked to make the
receiver accountable.
Here is another example, from the work of Emanuel Schegloff. As in Lyn and Zoe's situation, one
party (Carol) has just come into the room.

(From Schegloff, 1988, p 119 and 122; overlap notation simplified)

151 [door squeaks]

152 S: Hi Carol. =
153 C: = [Hi::
154 R: [CA:ROl, HI::
155 S: You didn't get en ice-cream sanwich,
156 C: I kno:w, hh I decided that my body didn't
need it,

S, like Caller and like Zoe, is 'noticing' something patently obvious. And Carol, like Receiver,
responds with an account - an explanation and a justification for why it is so. She did not bring
back the ice-cream sandwich (whatever that is) because 'her body didn't need it'.

So with that background CA work, we have a particular lever we can use to get a grip on what
what Zoe and Lyn are up to.

What is Zoe doing with her 'Noticing'?

Zoe notices that the camera's on, so an account is wanted. Things get interesting at this point.
You'll see that Lyn's next turn is pretty minimal - a bare 'yes'. Now that might do as an account, but
Zoe would be within her rights to treat it as rather inadequate.

And she does. Here's a reminder of what happens:

17 (6.0)
18 Zoe th' camera's on.
19 Lyn >yes<
20 (1.8)
21 Zoe w'(h) are you ta(h)lking to it while you
22 wORK?

At line 20 Zoe leaves a full 1.8 seconds (a significantly long time in a conversation) for Lyn to
expand, or come up with something that looks more like an explanation. It doesn't come. So we
hear the question in next line (21) as a more specific, targetted attempt to get an explanation. This
time, Zoe casts it as a yes/no question. The question makes clear the kind of response that Zoe is
looking for, but that Lyn has failed to give so far.

What have we learnt?

We could go on further, and see how far Lyn and Zoe get in reaching a mutually acceptable
explanation for the camera being on. If we were doing a full-blooded analysis of this episode,
that's one line we could take. If you wanted to, you could have a go yourself: look and see if Lyn
offers explanations, and if Zoe accepts them. You might go on to look and see, for example, if all
the business about the camera being on might help explain what Zoe means when she says "oh
god look what I'm wearing" in line 31.
But we've done enough for the exercise, if we've managed to illuminate what interactional
meaning such an apparently neutral observation as 'the camera's on' has had. Reports aren't always
just reports; like all language in interaction, they can accomplish things which aren't obvious at a
first glimpse.

Analysis 2: 'teasing"

We can use CA's accumulated knowledge of interaction again, as we did in example 1 on 'teasing'.
Here we'll think about what 's going on when Lyn says to Zoe "you look like Fagin".

The line appears a moment after the end of the transcript we've been using so far. To see the clip,
click here (or go to 'transcripts' in the main menu, and when the new screen comes up, click on
'you look like Fagin').

Here's the transcript (I've included the last few lines of what we've seen so far).

[Lyn & Zoe T5 31]

31 Zoe oh god (.) look what I'm wearing

32 (.3)
33 Lyn eh hehh huh [HUhh=
34 ?Zoe [(heh)
35 Lyn =you look like (.) Fa:gin
36 (.5)
37 Zoe eh HUHh HAhh h[ahh
38 Lyn [>heh hah hh< (.) H=
39 ((squeaky at end))
40 Zoe =w' maybe I am.
41 Lyn y' just need th' little gloves, with
42 th' fingers out.
43 (.8)
44 Zoe (v' funny)
45 (1.2)
46 Zoe (d'y wan' one.)

Teasing.

Again we might be guided by something already known to CA - this time, how a 'tease' is set off
and responded to.

Here I'm relying on work by Paul Drew. Have a look at one of his examples:

(GTS: I: 1: 44: R: 7; from Drew, 1987. Line numbers added; brackets added in lines 5 and 6)

1 Louise What do you do to make yourself distinct=

2 Roger =I mu- I must do something [I mean 'c[ause
3 Louise: [Mmhm [You
4 do,
5 Roger: ehhh hh [n hn
6 Al: [You JA:CK off in your chai:r
7 Roger: ehh heh .hehh Ya:h .hnff.hh
8 (.)
9 Roger: No everybody: (.) you know: looks for
10 this distinction.

We can read Al as teasing Roger in line 6.

Drew observes that teases seem to be set off by something 'pretentious' or 'exaggerated'. What
Roger says in line 2 is rather ostentatiously modest about what makes him distinctive. Al's ribald
suggestion of what that is 'takes him down a peg'. Does that help us at all here?

It makes us look again at what it was that Zoe said. She went out of the room saying 'oh god look
what I'm wearing'. She is calling attention to her clothes, complainingly. She implies that they
aren't putting her in a good light.

So we might then hear Lyn's 'you look like Fagin' to be a teasing comment on Zoe's display of
self-consciousness (or her dress sense?).

How does Zoe react? If she understands Lyn to be teasing her, perhaps she'll do what Drew reports
is usually (but not always) done in such cases. That is, respond at first lightly, but ultimately with
what Drew calls a 'po-faced' response ('po-faced' is I think a Britishism: it means a slightly sour facial expression ).

That certainly happens in the example we saw above. Roger does join in the fun, momentarily.
But he finishes off by rejecting the tease sternly (line 9).

Zoe's po-faced receipt.

That pattern, of initial laughter shading into 'crossness' and rejection, is just what happens in Zoe's
case. Here are the relevant lines again:

[Lyn & Zoe T5 35]

35 Lyn =you look like (.) Fa:gin

36 (.5)
37 Zoe eh HUHh HAhh h[ahh
38 Lyn [>heh hah hh< (.) H=
39 ((squeaky at end))
40 Zoe =w' maybe I am.
41 Lyn y' just need th' little gloves, with
42 th' fingers out.
43 (.8)
44 Zoe (ve'y funny)
45 (1.2)
46 Zoe (d'y wan' one.)
Zoe does laugh, at line 37. But she counters Lyn's implicit tease about her vanity with a combative
'well maybe I am'. Lynn extends the joke and makes the reference to clothing still more obvious
(y' just need the little gloves with the fingers out'). At this point Zoe drops her light-hearted
response utterly. She pauses for nearly a second, then issues a classic 'po-faced' piece of
grumpiness: "ve'y funny". And then she changes the subject, offering her mother a cigarette.

So Zoe and Lyn play out a tease in just the way Drew's CA work has identified as a regular
pattern. How does that help us?

Deviant identity?

Drew observes that the tease sets the teased person up as having a rather undesirable qualities - a
sexual deviant, perhaps, in the example from his work we saw above (someone whose
distinctiveness is that he 'jacks off in his chair'). To work, to be 'close to the bone', this has to be
reasonably plausible or well-founded, otherwise it would make no sense or miss the mark. You
couldn't, say, tease a swimmer about her achievements at cycling. She could just shrug it off as
being irrelevant.

So we might see Lyn as implying that the 'truth' of the tease is relevant and not to be shrugged off.
She attributes Zoe with the identity of 'Fagin', and makes it clear that this person is someone
whose clothes are questionable (or worse). The implication is that this 'close to the bone' - that Zoe
could, in fact, be seriously accused of carelessness in how she dresses.

There is a lot more to be said, but let's draw a line there.

If we've got this far, we'll have followed Drew's ideas to reach a point where we have a candidate
analysis of what Lyn and Zoe are doing at just that one point of the episode. We would then
combine it with similar analyses of the surrounding talk, and work up a full-blown explication of
what is going on in these 60 seconds. We would probably want to recall that Zoe's complaint about
her clothes come up in the environment of a challenge she has issued to Lyn to explain why the
camera is on, and see what that tells us. And we would want to see what we make of Zoe's choice
of a po-faced receipt of the tease, as opposed to a laughing one.

As you can see, it is very labour intensive. But one can go away satisfied that what one says about
the episode is well and truly grounded in what actually happened.