Methodology (improved)

   First of all, I transcribed my data by recording the conversations on my phone, listening to it again, writing it out on paper and then typing it up on Word. Each piece of data is about three minutes long and took about two hours to fully transcribe and type up. The transcript of children speaking, I've recorded from YouTube because now that all the children are in school I did not have time to sit down with my nieces because their parents were always too busy. The teenager’s conversation I have transcribed my friends and I talking in McDonald’s before college and the third transcript is of my dad and grandparents and myself talking about one of my dad’s cycling trips. The contexts aren't based on anything in particular because it decided that I would want to focus on some elements of spontaneous speech, therefore I didn't ask any of the conversational participants to talk about any one subject but let the conversation flow naturally.

Lexical and grammatical analysis

Lexical analysis

   Looking at adjacency pairs in the conversation between the teenagers there is a lack of turn taking in the conversation, this could be for many reasons such as the fact that the conversational participants are comfortable talking to each other or the fact that when Frazer, the only male participant, is taking part in the conversation he tends to break the adjacency pairs by using a string of declarative utterances. This could possibly be because h is male and partaking in conversation with two females and therefore might feel the need to assert his masculinity by saying what he thinks should be the topic of conversation. The string of declaratives he uses is as follows: "but it actually makes sense", "I'm kinda hungry", "it's a good job we're here", I probably missed breakfast (.) oh (.) I did miss breakfast" and the list continues until he leaves the conversation. He doesn't reply directly to either of the other's responses to his declaratives, this could be said to be because of the colloquial nature of the conversation or it could be directly relating to his relationship with the female participants. The misuse of the adjacency pairs could link to Zimmerman and West's theory that in mixed sex conversations men tend to interrupt more than women do, or to Fishman's theory that mixed sex conversation doesn't seem to work as well as single sex conversations because of how men respond or don't respond, and in this case it would be the not responding that is most important to my analysis.
  The second transcript that I've got is of myself, my dad and my grandparents; my dad and grandma are the two main conversational participants in the transcript and because the context is that they were looking at photos from a cycling trip, my dad is the one who speaks the most. My grandma uses quite a lot of back channel agreement to indicate to him that she is paying attention while he is talking, though without the context it could be seen as that she wasn't interested in what he was talking about. In total my dad's word count was two hundred and thirty two words and my grandma's was only seventy two; this is a clear indication that, again, if the context wasn't clear originally you would be able to tell that he is the main participant holding the most conversational power - which in a sense goes against the assumption that because it is a mother and her child conversing that she would have more conversational power. The topic that is being spoken about is something that my dad is more of an expert on, so those power roles are reversed.

Grammatical analysis

   Again relating back to language and gender, Frazer as the only male conversational participant, uses emphasis on his words to try and further explain them without talking more than necessary. His play on words "conversation hay" is meant to be a pun, but as the other two participants do not understand or find this funny, he uses emphasis on the word "hay" i hi third repetition of the utterance. This could be said to be typically male of him to assume that the other two female participants do not understand or are intellectually inept, which is untrue, as after he has left the conversation Laura and Robyn have a more in-depth conversation. When the topic changes after Frazer leaves the conversation, there is a high frequency of personal pronouns used by Laura and Robyn; because Laura is holding the conversation more than Robyn she uses about a third more personal pronouns than Robyn does. This is because she is talking about something that she had done as well as the fact that she was talking about another person using 'she' and 'her' a few times, though the most frequent one used by both of the participants is 'I' because they are talking to each other about past experiences that they themselves have had. Another thing to point out is that use of pauses rises after Frazer leaves the conversation, possibly because Laura and Robyn are comfortable with each other and don't feel the need to fill in the gaps, or it could even be a small case of the observer's paradox, where for instance Laura changes the  subject after a two second pause nearer to the end of the conversation, because she is aware that she is being recorded and might think that she needs to keep the conversation going for it to seem natural.

Adults talking transcript

M – and then you came all the way |along |

D -                                                 |all the| way along (.) until monkton coombe

M – yeah

D – and went through the two tunnels (3) and you go from monkton coombe (.) along a bit (.) off the (.) off the canal

M – right

D – and (.) then you join the (.) railway path (.) which is a new cycle path they’ve opened up through these two tunnels (.) you go un (.) onto the flat really

M – oh right (1) because there’s a (.) there’s a hill that goes up from monkton coombe from the A38 (.) that go (.) the A36 (.) that goes up like this

D – yeah (.) no we didn’t go up that (1) there (.) along the cycle path saw a (.) I think it was a gras snake

R – really

D – yeah (.) I was (.) |ahead|

R -                            |yeah  |

D – I was sort of lead by most of this grindy stuff (.) and he heard me coming and slithered off (.) into the grass

R – oh cool

D – see there’s the gorilla pod up there (.) look

M – oh yes (.) yes

R – [laughs] it |looks like it’s posing for the pic|ture with you

M -                |did it take a long time (.) time   |                          who took that one then

D – either paul or james

R – |pardon   |

G – |what did| you say Michael (.) lovely meal

D – yeah

G – was it in the pub

D – yeah (.) we had (.) um (.) steak ale (.) mushroom and ale pie (.) chips (.) cauliflower broccoli  carrots (.) it was really nice

G – and pud

D – don’t think we had a pud

M – your coffee’s over there mike

D – ah (.) thanks (2) so (.) that’s dundus aquaduct

M – mhm

D – (6) back along the cycle path or one of the lanes there

R – (4) did you have someone waiting to take the pictures (2) for you

D – no we (.) just sort of (.) |sometimes I’d put|

M -                                     |where’s that then |

D – this is in (.) um (.) the park in nailsea

M – oh (.) |right|

D –           |now| |that’s|

R -                     |is it    |

D – Adge Cutler (1) |who’s one of the Wurzles      |

R -                           |I didn’t know we had statues | [laughs] |is he from| Nailsea

D -                                                                                       |that is the|              yeah I think so (2) Hannah moore (.) who was a philanthropist in the seventeenth or eighteenth century

M – mhm

D – who built schools

M – right

D – around Bristol and (.) uh (.) nailsea (1) and that is a fella called Coate (.) of Coate’s cider (.) cause Coate’s cider (.) used to be made in Nailsea

M – that’s quite cool

D – yeah

R – we like cider (.) yes yes yes [laughs]

D – (1) yeah so (.) it was really good

R – (4) forty one pictures (.) is that all like final ones |so you have mo|re than those

D -                                                                          |yeah final ones  |

M – yeah (.) great

D – yeah (.) |we had|

R -              |loads   |

D – loads

G – what (1) what happened today then (.) did dad come and get you

R – yeah (.) he did

D – (1) and (.) Robyn’s got work

R – (1) yeah I’ve got a staff meeting (.) for a couple of hours

G – say again

R – I’ve got a staff meeting for a couple of hours

G – (3) you’ve got a staff meeting

R – yeah (.) af (.) after the store closes so it’s Sunday (.) so it’s from |five| til seven

G -                                                                                                   |oh  |

M – so what are you (.) doing (.) um

Types of sentence graph for Teenager's transcript

Graphs showing data collected from transcription of teengers talking

Created on http://www.onlinecharttool.com

Analysis of children talking together transcript

   In my previous post you can see that Emily and Ollie are picking up words from their mum and the other conversational participant, Lucy, really easily. Both of these children are clearly from the telegraphic stage judging by their lack of using determiners, pronouns, negatives and interrogatives. Even by looking at solely the language used by these two children in conversation with adults you can tell that Emily and Ollie are about two and a half to three years old. For instance the abundance of repetition that is involved in the whole conversation is huge; Emily seems to be copying almost everything that her mum or Lucy say to try and either grasp the meaning of it or to just continue the adjacency pairs, which are practically all imperatives used by the adults and empty repetition from the children, so that the conversation flows (as she must have previously learnt that it needs to). This can relate to Wolfgang Enard's research which was conducted which shows how children's brains are hardwired for understanding and learning language as they are encouraged by their carers and the people around them that they interact with. Something to back up Enard's research is the FOX P2 gene, which is the gene that has been discovered that supports Chomsky's nature over nurture theory, wherein the human brain is ready for language but just needs to be continually stimulated so that the child can gain the ability to speak whatever language they are taught by their carer or from the environment that they are living in.

   Emily can be clearly identified as the younger sibling as she repeats certain nouns, for example when she wants her mum to go away she says, "mummy go away" a couple of times and then moves on to "outside (.) go outside". Then further on in the conversation she seems to just say "side" instead of "outside" which indicates that she has omitted the prefix "out", which shows that she clearly doesn't understand the syntactical development and of words in a sentence. The first utterance that she repeats is "fire hot (.) fire hot" which is completely out of context, but is forgiven because she is probably only three years old. She's missed out the third person verb "is" from this utterance; therefore it can't be classed as a sentence because it is incomplete. As the conversation progresses you can see that in all the times that she repeats something that an adult has said, she doesn't said "is" once, proving that she must be in the telegraphic stage of language development and lacks the syntactical development to construct proper sentences.
   Their mum, Lucy and their dad together all use a lot of imperatives to instruct the children with what to do, but more towards the end of the conversation the mum is scaffolding Emily's language to encourage her to talk and respond correctly. At the beginning of the transcript the adults are correcting the children, then they move to telling them what to do and gradually move from that to the scaffolding of the children's language in an attempt to encourage Emily to keep on track with the conversation as she kept getting distracted and going completely off topic, and to also lead by example and use standard correct English to hopefully be copied by her as she had done previously.