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Thus, although implicitly claiming scientific rigour, the transformation of
talk into text is more arbitrary and depends on factors such as the analyst's
interests. As my specific interests are similar to the latter body of works cited my
method of transcription will generally follow theirs (see 'Transcription
Conventions' outlined in the introductory pages of this thesis). As regards the
German data, these have undergone a second transformative process, that of
translation. All translations were carried out by my wife Elke, a German native
speaker with an excellent command of English as a second language. I have
full confidence then that the propositional content of conversational turns to be
as accurately represented as possible throughout. Where linguistic phenomena
occur in the German data that are not readily semantically represented in
English (examples might be the German doch), I will attempt to make a clear
note of this. To ensure external validation, transcripts drawn from the German
data are presented to the general reader in both translated and original German
form.
On occasion, selected episodes were omitted from the final corpus. The
main reasons for this were first, the need to arrive at a corpus of a manageable
size, and second my own decision to exclude data from inclusion in the thesis
on what might generally be termed ethical grounds. Examples of omitted
episodes included highly personal topics, ones which might lead to the
identification of one or the other participant, or instances of non-dialogic talk
such as extended monologue (although in this latter case a note was made of
the length of monologue and participants alignments to this). These factors
together with the ones outlined as part of the initial analysis procedure are
outlined in table 4.3.
The procedure for data collection and initial management outlined above
allowed me to collate a substantial corpus of sociable conversation from each
milieu. This data provided me with the necessary empirical basis on which to
conduct an analysis of facework in sociable episodes as suggested in Chapter
3, and pursue the specific research questions set out at the outset of this
chapter. The analytical chapters (Chapter 6 to 8) shall draw heavily on this
corpus of sociable conversation.
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