The term ‘discourse analysis’ has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities. It is used to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics and computational linguistics. Scholars working centrally in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse. Sociolinguists are particularly concerned with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation, and their descriptions emphasise features of social context which are particularly amenable to sociological classification. They are concerned with generalising across ‘real’ instances of language in use, and typically work with transcribed spoken data. Psycholinguists are particularly concerned with issues related to language comprehension. They typically employ a tight methodology derived from experimental psychology, which investigates problems of comprehension in short constructed texts or sequences of written sentences. Philosophical linguists, and formal linguists, are particularly concerned with semantic relationships between constructed pairs of sentences and with their syntactic realisations. They are concerned, too, with relationships between sentences and the world in terms of whether or not sentences are used to make statements which can be assigned truth-values. They typically investigate such relationships between constructed sentences attributed to archetypal speakers addressing archetypal hearers in (minimally specified) archetypal contexts. Computational linguists working in this field are particularly concerned with producing models of discourse processing and are constrained, by their methodology, to working with short texts constructed in highly limited contexts.

The general issue of what a transcription represents is considered at length in 1.2. In the transcriptions we present in this book, a variable amount of detail is included from one to the next, for the straightforward reason that different extracts are studied for different purposes.

In the transcription of spoken data we always attempt to record as faithfully as possible what was said and we have avoided ‘tidying up’ the language used. Consequently some apparently ungrammatical forms, as well as occasional dialect forms, appear in several extracts. In addition, there are examples of repetition, hesitation, and incomplete sentences commonly found in transcripts of spoken data.

The occurrence of short pauses is marked by −, longer pauses by +, and extended pauses by ++. A detailed discussion of pausing is presented in 5.1. In the intonational representations which accompany some extracts, a simple three-line stave is used. The lines of the stave represent the top, mid and low points of the speaker's pitch range (for a detailed discussion of intonational representation, see Brown, Currie & Kenworthy, 1980).