Lectura Tema 2(b)-Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

these practices make intentionality of both speechand thought possible.

An account of this sort will succeed only if notionsof ‘correctness’, ‘entitlement’, ‘commitment’, and soon, can themselves be understood in non-intentionaland non-semantic terms. If we must presuppose thatthe relevant performances – both the utterances them-selves and others’ attitudes toward these utterances –are meaningful, if, for example, we must presupposethat these performances either involve the use of ante-cedently meaningful expressions or consist in actionsproduced with certain intentions in mind, then theirmeaningfulness does not reside in, or result from, theconforming and censuring practices themselves. Theproject fails if the social practices that supposedlyconfer meaning cannot be explained without presup-posing that the performances governed by these prac-tices have meaning. It is not obvious that thisexplanatory burden has been discharged.

A Non-Reductive Proposal

A non-reductive construal of the norms-based projectis possible. One might see the task of articulating thestructure of the norms governing overt speech asexposing how the intentionality of thought and the(public) norms governing overt speech are intimatelyconnected. Such an account would aim to showthat we cannot understand representation, in eitherlanguage or thought, without a notion of inference,that is, without the idea of certain claims entitling orjustifying others. (This idea is a cornerstone of theCRS developed by Wilfred Sellars.) On this construal,the project is an attempt to work out the interconnec-tions between language and thought, without takingeither as basic.

See also: Mentalese.

Bibliography

Block N (1986). ‘Advertisement for a Semantics for Psy-chology.’ In French P A, Uehling T E Jr & Wettstein H K(eds.) Midwest studies in philosophy 10: Studies in thePhilosophy of Mind. Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press.

Brandom R B (1994). Making it explicit: reasoning, repre-senting, and discursive commitment. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Cummins R (1989). Meaning and mental representation.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Davidson D (1984). Inquiries into truth and interpretation.Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fodor J A (1990). ‘A theory of content, I, II.’ In Fodor J A(ed.) A theory of content and other essays. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press. 51–136.

Frege G (1892). ‘On sense and reference.’ Black M (trans.).Reprinted in Ludlow P (ed.). Readings in the philosophyof language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 563–583.

Grice H P (1957). ‘Meaning.’ Philosophical Review 66,377–388.

Millikan R (1984). Language, thought, and other biologicalcategories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Putnam H (1975). ‘The meaning of ‘meaning’.’ In Putnam H(ed.) Philosophical papers, vol. 2. Mind, language,and reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.215–271.

Sellars W (1956). ‘Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.’In Scriven M, Feyerabend P & Maxwell G (eds.) Minne-sota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 253–329.

Stich S P & Warfield T A (eds.) (1994). Mental representa-tion: a reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

556 Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

Researching Naturally Occurring
Speech P Cukor-Avila, University of North Texas, Denton,
TX, USA

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Defining the Issue

Perhaps the most important challenge for linguistswho study language in its social context is to devisea methodology that allows them to record the every-day linguistic behavior of their informants, i.e., thecasual, unmonitored speech that normally occurs out-side of the sociolinguistic interview (Labov, 1966,

1972a). However, the typical sociolinguistic inter-view is an unnatural speech event – interviews areoften set up in advance; many of the conversationsare between fieldworkers and interviewees and notamong the interviewees themselves; and in most casesthe fieldworker, who is often a stranger to the inter-viewee and to the community itself, controls thetopics and conversational turns. Moreover, the pres-ence of an observer (a fieldworker with a recordingdevice) creates an unnatural context for informalconversation, resulting in what Labov (1966) referredto as the ‘observer’s paradox’ (the skewing of linguis-

Researching Naturally Occurring Speech 557

tic behavior toward norms of correctness as a resultof the mere presence of a fieldworker). As a result, theinterview itself creates a situation where obtainingthe most casual speech styles is difficult at best.

Approaches to Fieldwork

Community Fieldworkers

Over the past four decades sociolinguists havedesigned varying approaches to fieldwork in an effortto mitigate the effects of the observer’s paradox.Because the social and ethnic barriers between field-workers and informants are often cited as key factorsthat could affect stylistic variation, one popularapproach has been to use fieldworkers who are eithercommunity members, ethnically similar, or in the bestscenario, both. Labov (1972b) was one of the firstresearchers to use same-race community members asfieldworkers to record the use of African AmericanVernacular English (AAVE) by adolescents in Harlem.Wolfram (1974) in Mississippi, Wolfram, andChristian (1976) in Appalachia, and most recentlyRickford and McNair-Knox (1994) in East Palo Altohave all used similar fieldwork strategies.

While differences in data from community and non-community members have not been systematicallyinvestigated (although recent work by Bell, 2001touches on this issue), Rickford and McNair-Knox(1994) have tested the hypothesis of same-race field-workers through a quantitative comparison of theuse of five African American Vernacular English(AAVE) features by an urban African American teen-ager in interviews conducted by both an AfricanAmerican and an Anglo fieldworker. They show thatthe teenager’s use of AAVE features is significantlyhigher in the interview conducted by the AfricanAmerican fieldworker, and conclude that the race ofthe interviewer accounts for this discrepancy.

Research by Cukor-Avila and Bailey (2001), how-ever, suggests that other factors, including interviewcontext and familiarity of the interview participants,might have influenced Rickford and McNair-Knox’sresults. For example, when the African Americanfieldworker recorded her interview her teenagedaughter, who went to the same school as the inter-viewee, accompanied her. These two young womenfunctioned as a kind of peer group during the inter-view. In contrast, the Anglo fieldworker, who had notpreviously met the teenager, was the only personpresent during the interview. Cukor-Avila and Bailey’sdata from parallel interviews with rural Texas speak-ers show that when interview context and familiarityof the interview participants remain constant, there isno significant difference in the use of AAVE features

for two female speakers (one teenage and one elderly)when interviewed by African American communitymembers and when interviewed by an Anglo field-worker who had spent several years in the communi-ty. In fact, the only statistically significant differencethey found was in the use of invariant be by theteenage girl who used it more frequently withthe Anglo fieldworker. Their results suggest that anyeffects the race of the interviewer might typicallyhave on vernacular use can be minimized when field-workers have spent time in the community and arefamiliar with community norms (see discussionbelow).

Peer Group Recordings

Another strategy frequently used by fieldworkersto reduce the effects of the observer’s paradox is torecord subjects in peer group contexts. Labov et al.(1968) used this strategy in conjunction with a com-munity fieldworker in interviews conducted withAfrican Americans and Puerto Ricans in New YorkCity. Blom and Gumperz (1986), Cheshire (1982),Eckert (1989), Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1996),and Childs and Mallinson (2004) have all systemati-cally incorporated interviews with peer groups intotheir fieldwork. They used groups that ‘self-select,’and, like Milroy (1987a,b), interviewed thesegroups in places where they naturally congregate.Fieldwork in Philadelphia (Labov, 1984) extendedthe community fieldworker approach with the addi-tion of a set of question modules designed to controlthe topics of conversation. Fieldworkers can oftenmanipulate topics in order to direct the conversationto subjects that lead to more spontaneous speech.This strategy has also been used to create conver-sational contexts for interviewees to use targetedforms, e.g., beþVþing, as in She be tellin’ me whatto do an’ I don’t like it, for AAVE speakers (Baileyand Maynor, 1987, 1989). (For a criticism of thisstrategy, see Wolfram, 1987.)

Ethnographic Fieldwork

Sociolinguists have also incorporated the techniquesof participant observation used by ethnographers(cf. Geertz, 1973; Spradley, 1980; Schieffelin, 1979;Eckert, 1989) into their fieldwork. In an ethnographicapproach fieldworkers:

. Invest a substantial amount of time in a community.They delve deeply into a community by visitingthere frequently over an extended period of time(or by living there), and by participating in everydaycommunity activities.

. Document and record the everyday language of acommunity in its cultural context.


. Capture actual linguistic interaction rather thansurrogates for interaction.

. Continually evaluate observations of and informa-tion gathered from community members, therebyallowing the linguistic data to be interpreted withinthe context of the cultural behavior and knowledgeof the community.

Participant-observation may be one of the best waysto reduce the effects of the observer’s paradox and todocument the linguistic interactions of communitymembers with each other, rather than with fieldwor-kers. This is because the more time fieldworkersspend in a community interacting with residents ona daily basis, the more they will be trusted and the lessthey will be perceived as outsiders. Both Baugh(1983) and Dayton (1996) have made effective useof participant-observation in their studies of AAVEspeakers in Los Angeles (Baugh) and Philadelphia(Dayton); however, they typically did not tape theirobservations. Thus, their data are limited to theobservations they could make on the spot and recordon note cards shortly thereafter. As is shown in theexamples below, informal conversations can be tapedwithin the context of ethnographic fieldwork.

An Ethno-Linguistic Approach toFieldwork

What follows is an overview of an approach to field-work that is both ethnographic and linguistic.This approach was developed during the course of alongitudinal study in the rural Texas communityof Springville (the name of the community and thenames of informants mentioned in the examplesbelow are all pseudonyms), designed to documentlinguistic variation and change in rural Southernspeech over time (see Cukor-Avila, 1995; Cukor-Avila and Bailey, 1995; and Bailey and Cukor-Avila,forthcoming for a complete discussion of the historyof Springville and the methodology of the Springvilleproject). The approach applies insights from ethnog-raphy to sociolinguistic fieldwork and demonstrateshow sociolinguists can shift the focus of study to thecommunity itself, consequently allowing the record-ing of people as they normally interact with each otheron a daily basis. More specifically, this approachrecords people in normal sites of linguistic interactionwith one another rather than with fieldworkers, talk-ing about topics that they normally talk about andinvolved in the kinds of speech events they normallyparticipate in.

The Community of Springville

Springville is a contemporary relic of the plantationagriculture that developed during tenancy and wastypical of the post-Civil War South; in fact, many ofthe community’s approximately 150 residents eitherworked as tenant farmers or are their descendents.Most of the land and almost all of the houses areowned by one woman, who also owns the only storein town. She maintains financial control over much ofthe community – many residents borrow money fromher and purchase items from the store on credit,reconciling their tabs on the first of the month aftershe cashes their government checks.

The significance of the store for the residents ofSpringville is not unique. The country store in thepost-Civil War South played a major part in shapingthe lives of rural people and served as the foundationfor the economy of the New South (Ayers, 1992).

The role that the store plays in Springville was themost important consideration in the development ofthe field methods used throughout the project. Thestore is not only the principal place of business in thecommunity, but more importantly, it is also the pri-mary community hangout. It provides a meetingplace for people to gossip, watch soap operas, eatlunch, read their mail, or simply just pass the time.This is especially true on days when rainy weatherprevents people from working in the fields.

The Springville Project

The Springville Project relied on three techniques toameliorate the effects of the observer’s paradox:

1. Multiple interviews with informants.2. Interviews in which informants interacted with

each other rather than or in addition to field-workers.

3. The use of community fieldworkers.

Most fieldworkers know that subsequent interviewswith informants usually produce more unguardedconversations and speech more like that used whenno fieldworker is present. The Springville Projectapplied this observation as an organizing principle:people were interviewed as many times as possible,not only over a period of years (for longitudinalpurposes), but also within the same year (to increasethe familiarity between interviewer and interviewee).What made this approach possible, of course, was theextensive amount of time that fieldworkers PatriciaCukor-Avila and Guy Bailey spent in the commu-nity. Cukor-Avila’s daily visits to Springville over atwo-month period and frequent return visits by bothCukor-Avila and Bailey over the years have provided


many opportunities for additional interviews. Theeffects of subsequent interviews can be dramatic, asTexts 1 and 2 below demonstrate.

Multiple Interviews Over Time

Text 1 was recorded July 12, 1988, and is the firstinterview Cukor-Avila conducted with Vanessa, anAfrican American female born in 1961.

Text 1

CA:
What time do you, what time does the storeopen? Like what time do you work from?
V:
I come at eight an’ get off at four thirty. CA: Uh huh. So what do your kids do while they’re
at home? What do they do during the daytimewhen they’re not in school?

V:
Well they jus’ got outta summer school an’ theyjus’, they haven’ been doin’ too much ofanything but layin’ aroun’ watchin’ TV an’fussin’ an’ fightin’ an’ callin’ over herefor me. [laughs]
CA:
Oh yeah you can hear ‘em I bet. V: Yeah. CA: So what kinda’ stuff do they fight over? Now
lemme see now, tell me who’s the oldest? Theboy or the girl?

V:
The girl. CA: An’ then the next one is . . . V: Is the boy an’ the girl. CA: Uh huh, so who fights with who? V: It be, it be mostly the baby fightin’ with the
oldes’ girl. She jealous. She always wantthings to go her way. An’ when it don’t shewanna fight ’em. So it’s the baby alwayswanna fight.

CA:
Uh huh. So what about the boy? What does heplay, referee?
V:
Yeah, he do. He uh, he’s, he’s like the man of thehouse. He watch over them an’ when they getto fussin’ too much he get on ’em. He keeps’em in order.
Recorded shortly after Cukor-Avila first met Vanessa,the text reflects classic interview style and follows asimple question/answer format, with Vanessa answer-ing all of the questions but providing little elaboration.While the interview (and even this short text) includesa number of vernacular features, no one would arguethat it reflects the everyday speech that Vanessa useswhen no fieldworker is present. A second interviewrecorded a week later demonstrates the advantagesof follow-up interviews. Vanessa’s responses aremuch more elaborate, and she provides an unsolicitednarrative on a rather personal topic. It is more like theeveryday speech that the fieldworkers had observedVanessa using with other Springville residents.

The next passage, recorded nine years later, (March13, 1997) after many visits with Vanessa, is less likean interview and more like a conversation betweentwo friends. The interviewee feels free to change andinitiate topics, and she assumes that the fieldworkerhas a repository of shared knowledge regarding thecharacters in the narrative. Both Vanessa’s languageand her linguistic interactions are much like what shehad been observed using on numerous occasions withfriends and family in Springville.

Text 2

V:
They some nuts. I can’t stan’ ’em. I had to goover there an’, an’, an’ uh with my gun an’trip out on them about her.
CA:
What? What happened? V: R called me one night an’ she say, ‘‘Aunt V,’’ she
say, ‘‘I’m tired of them runnin’ over P.’’
Say it was C tried to jump on her firs’ an’ then
the sisters an’ then the mama was cussin’ herout. I told R about it that night an’ P was overhere. I say, ‘‘This is it.’’ I say, ‘‘I’m fit to goover here an’ ‘front these people an’ let themknow that she got somebody that love her an’if they keep messin’ with her I will shoot ’em.’’

So I got my gun. They say, ‘‘We ain’ gonna letyou go by yourself.’’

So B, R, an’ P went with me. I went over therean’ knocked, I knocked on the door. An’ theysay, ‘‘Who is it?’’ I say, ‘‘It’s Vanessa.’’ ‘‘Comein.’’ I say, ‘‘No I’m not comin’ in. Yall comeoutside.’’ So she opened the door. I say,‘‘Lookie here. I’m tired of yall messin’ withmy child. If, if you don’t want her here or she’snot welcome around here I’ll take her homewith me right now.’’

I said, ‘‘But yall not gonna keep runnin’ over heran’ keep fightin’ her an’ keep cussin’ herbecause I will shoot you. An’ I’m not gonnaplay with yall. An’ the nex’ time that I haftacome out here by my child I’m comin’ an’ I’mgon be ready to do somethin’ to all of yall.’’Ohhh they were scared. And uh, an’ I wassayin’, ‘‘If you don’t like what I’m sayin’ comeon out here an’ we can jus’, we can dowhatever we gotta do tonight an’ get it overwith.’’

Ohhh they were scared Patricia. They closed thedoor on me an’ I asked P. I said, ‘‘P. do youwanna come home?’’ [mimics] ‘‘No.’’ I say,‘‘You so crazy.’’ I said, ‘‘But you gonna cry an’you gonna wish you hada came home withme.’’ An’ sure enough in a month time shecame home. I say, ‘‘I’m not gonna put up nomore with yall’s junk.’’ An’ everytime they seeme they still scared of me.

I wasn’ playin’ with ’em. I was tired of it. An’,an’ I, I guess they kep’ doin’ her wrong


because you know they, I guess they felt likethat nobody, you know, she didn’ havenobody to care about her an’ stuff. I wen’ an’let them know that’s my child an’ you’re notgonna keep doin’ her wrong. Uh huh.

Peer Group Interviews

As useful as multiple interviews with informantsare for ameliorating the observer’s paradox, theystill involve an interviewer talking to an interviewee.Linguists have frequently used group interviews as amechanism for creating situations in which infor-mants talk to one another. Group interviews havebeen used most often with teenagers and adolescents(cf. Labov, 1968, 1972b), but the Springville Projectextended this mechanism to adults and used it asan organizing principle for fieldwork. Moreover,the priority of the Springville Project was record-ing naturally occurring groups rather than groupsbrought together by the fieldworkers specifically foran interview. Multiple interviews, an ethnolinguisticapproach to fieldwork, and the frequent presence ofthe fieldworkers in the community were crucial inidentifying and recording these naturally occurringgroups.

Text 3, which is from an interview with twoAfrican American males born in 1913, is an exampleof a recording with a naturally occurring peer group,while the circumstances that led to the interviewillustrate how interviews such as these come about.Cukor-Avila first met Wallace in July 1988 whileshe was interviewing another Springville resident.During the course of that interview Wallace, whowas selling vegetables, drove up, was introduced toCukor-Avila, and joined in the conversation. Cukor-Avila and Bailey subsequently interviewed Wallaceindividually on five occasions over the next threeweeks. Wallace then invited them to his house for ahome-cooked barbecue dinner; unbeknownst tothem, he had also invited his best friend, Reggie.Text 3 is from the two-hour interview recorded onthat occasion (August 17, 1988). As this excerptabout Hurricane Carla suggests, the interview con-sists primarily of conversation between Wallace andReggie – of two friends talking to one another ratherthan to the fieldworkers (CA, GB).

Text 3

R:
Yeah. I was jus’ gettin’ outta work here when itwas ol’ Carla.
W:
Boy it was rough down here, it was rough. R: Sure I mean.
W:
All cars. R: You oughta seen Galveston. W: All cars, all cars all off in the ditch. R: You oughta seed Galveston. CA: There probably wasn’t much of it huh. R: That great big ol’ steel, them brick, stone
houses, rock houses, brick homes, an’ some ofthem buildings out there with that steel in itthat wide. It jus’ double it up like that.

W:
I went, I went up here to look at this here inWaco that time R was heading up there . . . .
R:
I bet you I went up there twice. W: The man had said, ‘‘Shoot ain’ no way in the
world.’’ I said, ‘‘Well what you think aboutthat?’’ Man them railroads, rail, it jus’ bent’em double. An’ that rail, that bridge that goacross the river – it tore it up.

R:
That man told me in Waco – I went up theretwice up there – an’ them guys told me theywas sittin’ where, jus’ like this house sittin’ onconcrete blocks or cedar block, had long leftthere. An’ he said they frigidaires was in theair like paper.
W:
Well I was sittin’ over there on the railroad. I wasworkin’ on the railroad up there. I had a sisterover there. It blowed all her stuff away. An’then see they wouldn’ let us come in there,over there, ’cause they had done got all themsoldiers from, from Killeen up there. Theywouldn’ let us come there. I couldn’ get nofurther to the river. The further they let us go.They wouldn’ let us go over there.
GB:
That was in Waco. There was a big tornado upthere?
W:
That was in Waco. R: Yeah man. Went right down the street, an’ when
it got to the courthouse it just parted.

Addressing the Observer’s Paradox

Group interviews such as in Text 3 provide significantamounts of speech between Springville residents, butthe interviewers nevertheless remain part of the inter-view context. The ultimate goal of sociolinguisticfieldwork, however, is to diminish the role ofthe interviewer and allow informants to interactwith each other, as they would normally do ifthe fieldworker were not present. An importantcomponent of Labov’s model of stylistic variation(i.e., the consequences of the amount of attentionpaid to speech) was the creation of contexts withinthe casual interview situation that would elicitspontaneous speech, a style used in excited, emotion-ally charged conversations when informants wouldbe the least likely to pay attention to their speech(Labov, 1972a). These contexts include remarks to

Figure 1 Interlocutor roles (adapted from Bell A (1984). ‘Lan-

guage style as audience design.’ Language in Society 13, 145–204

with permission of Cambridge University Press).


the interviewer outside of the formal interview itself;speech to third parties who happen to intrude on theinterview; speech not in direct response to questions(i.e., digressions); discussions of childhood gamesand rhymes; and responses to danger of deathquestions.

Labov’s techniques for eliciting spontaneous speechstyles were a key advance in sociolinguistic field meth-ods. Subsequent variation research, however, has sug-gested that not all of these strategies successfullycreate contexts for the most casual speech. Milroy(1987a), for example, suggests that fieldworkershave no way of ensuring the intrusion of third partiesor even of systematically getting comments outside ofthe formal interview context. Moreover, the use ofdanger of death questions is often inappropriate –such was the case for her informants in Belfast.

An alternative conception of style defines stylisticvariation as a direct consequence of speakers’ linguis-tic accommodation to the people who are listening tothem – of a shift toward the interlocutors’ speech. Asa result, stylistic or intraspeaker variation should beanalyzed in light of the speech of a speaker’s audiencesince it is the speech of the audience that providesboth the impetus for variation in the first place andalso the target for accommodation. Bell’s audiencedesign theory produces a model that can be perceivedof as a series of concentric circles, as in Figure 1. Thefurther away in audience role interlocutors are, theless effect they will have on intraspeaker variationand thus on the degree of accommodation.

Bell’s approach to style provides a scheme for under-standing how the observer’s paradox works. As Table 1shows, the concepts from audience design can beadapted to estimate the effect that a fieldworkermight have on intraspeaker variation (or styleshifting). In individual interviews, the staple of socio-linguistic methodology, the fieldworker is the ad-dressee; in addition, the fieldworker is often anoutsider to the community and frequently a memberof a different social class or ethnic group. In peergroup interviews the role of the fieldworker shiftsfrom addressee to auditor and the peers become theaddressees as group members primarily interact witheach other and not with the fieldworker. This is clearlyshown in Text 3 above.

Site Studies

The third interview situation, site studies (see Text 4below), provides a context where the fieldworker is aparticipant-observer (cf. Geertz, 1973; Spradley,1980) rather than a ‘ratified participant’ (Bell, 1984,2001) at community gathering places. Moreover, thefieldworker becomes an overhearer to interactionswhere peers are the primary addressees and audi-tors (see Table 1). Site studies represent a strategyfor ameliorating the observer’s paradox becausethe focus of the fieldwork is not on the speech ofindividual informants, but on the speech used atstrategic sites of linguistic interaction over a givenperiod of time (Cukor-Avila and Bailey, 1995).Many of the recordings during the initial phase ofthe Springville fieldwork in 1988–1989 were doneat the Springville Store, the main gathering place inthe village, where Cukor-Avila was hanging out on adaily basis. Over time she became friends with peoplefrom the community and gained their trust, and soonthe interviews became closely intertwined with theday-to-day business of the store and began to includea wide range of unsolicited linguistic interactions,including teasing, arguments, jokes, business transac-tions, and the routine conversations that make upmuch of Springville’s linguistic activity. Cukor-Avilawas able to record these conversations between com-munity members because they arose naturally whileshe was talking to people in the store.

Text 4, which is an excerpt from a site studyrecorded at the Springville Store in August 1988,provides examples of this type of interaction. Thesetexts also illustrate three main features of site studies:(1) the rapid and natural ways that interlocutor roleschange, (2) the rapid and natural ways that topicschange without input from the fieldworker, and (3)the occurrence of embedded and parallel conversa-tions (shown in italics in the transcripts).

Table 1 Typical audience structure of different types of fieldwork

Audience design Addressee Auditor Overhearer Eavesdropper

Individual interviews Fieldworker ——— ——— ———

Peer group interviews Peers Fieldworker ——— ———

Site studies Peers [fieldworker] Peers [fieldworker] Fieldworker/peers [Fieldworker]

Community fieldworker Interviewee/peers Peers ——— ———


Text 4

R:
Me an’ my girlfrien’walkin’ one night,walkin’ . . . [RB andS overlap]
RB:Y
That’s the same oneyou an’ M. saw ain’it?
S: Y
eah that’s the onethey say an’ thenM. tol’ me he ain’tellin’ the truth.Same way I tell himfirs’. [SR walksup],. Mr. Stan!
RB:H
owdy Mr. Stan. SR: W hat’s, what’s goin’
on, the riff?
S: T he riff. Nothin’ but
the riff. Get a sodiewater. O.K., uh,we’ll be down hereall day I ‘magine.[laughs]

R:
[continues his story] An’ uh, we were walkin’along there talkin’. Then cross the railroadtrack. All at once grabbed me a stick. ‘‘Hey boy,what you standin’ on me for?’’ ‘‘Don’ you seethat man you walkin’ into?’’ She mean it. Shecould see him.
S:
But she seen him? R: Uh huh. S: Man. Wooo. Now I knew I was seein’ things
which I thought was a ghost. But when youcome to realize that it, it don’ be nothin’ but abush [L. overlaps]

L:
That you see in the road. S: . . . or, or somethin’ that, that, you know, that you
haven’ seen.

R:
I know, I know some guy – that be years ago –about six young guys, you talkin’ about youngmen. Well they had a meetin’ that day in thechurch at night. There was this crazy Germanin the church. Along in them days you didn’have no uh, lightnin’ paper. You had to usenewspaper. People goin’ to church an’ they’dthrow the paper down side of the road an’ itblowed up aroun’ in some piles that was aboutthat high. An’ them guys walkin’ to the churchthat night an’ the wind’s blowin’. An’ thatpaper come an’ blowed up aroun’ that stuff.They looked at [unintelligible]. Everyone of ‘emhad a gun. They emptied that, them guns in thatpaper an’ BOOM! [S laughs and overlaps R]Newspaper blowed up aroun’ in piles an’ stuff. . .
S:
An’ that’s all it was? R: Uh huh. S: You see that, that’s what I’m talkin’ about here.
A person eyes can fool you.
R: Oh yeah. S: Oh, they can fool you. R: But I ain’ gonna let
mine fool me.

S: [t
o P.] Hey lover,where you goin’?
P: T
o wash my hands. S: [t o FW] You didn’
know that she was alover did you?[laughs]

R:
My eyes ain’ never fooled me but one time. Thattime I tell you I, that man come down on me.
S:
Uh huh. R: Well it didn’ fool me then. An’ I’ve no doubt what
it was.
S: Well it, it was a real man? R: No. It wasn’ nothin’ but a large snake standin’ up
in the fiel’. M shot it for me walkin’ jus’ like itwas [S laughs/overlaps]

S:
Hey. Well one night I did the same thing. I runfrom a, a stump. It started off, started off aboutthis high. It was humped over like that. I run tillI jus’ run myself to death. An’ the nex’ dayI went back by there. I said, ‘‘I’m gonna seewhat was that.’’ An’ it was jus’ a ol’ tree theyhad cut off high.
A:
Tell the reason why you were runnin’.


S:
Shit. Girl I was runnin’. See I was doin’ somethin’I don’ have no business to know with. Youknow that! [everyone laughs] Thought I hadgot caught an’ I was runnin’ like the devil. An’the nex’ day I come back by there. I said, ‘‘Youknow a man’d kill hisself for nothin’ wouldn’he.’’ ‘Cause if somein’ got in my way I’d runover it. An’ you know you can run a long wayswhen you’re scared. You can move an’ neverget tired.
A:
Specially when you somewheres where you ain’s’posed to be.
S:
Yeah I was where I wasn’ s’posed to be. [laughs]I didn’ do it no more neither. I got scared. Thatscared me good! I said, ‘‘Ohh.’’ I ain’ gonna tellyall what I said but I sure was cussin’ boy. I said,‘‘Hot dog got caught!’’
In Text 4, Cukor-Avila is an auditor and an over-hearer; S directly addresses her in an aside. Moreover,because Cukor-Avila is not an interviewer but a par-ticipant in a community activity, she does not controlthe floor (i.e., does not determine who speaks), nordoes she control the topics. The natural, everydayflow of linguistic interaction that typically takesplace at the store develops. There are also two em-bedded conversations within this excerpt. The firstone occurs when R attempts to begin his story butpauses while RB and S have a short conversation inwhich others at the store are not ratified participants.The second one occurs when S flirts with P, whopasses by on her way to the bathroom. (Flirting andteasing are common speech acts in the store; thisepisode is typical).

While embedded conversations such as these aretypical of the everyday linguistic interaction at thestore, parallel conversations among different sets ofinterlocutors are just as common. In these situations,one group of interlocutors carries on a conversa-tion independently of, and sometimes even unawareof, another group that is carrying on a conversa-tion. Oftentimes lulls in one group’s conversationallow members to overhear part of another group’sconversation and occasionally to make commentsacross groups. Moreover, people occasionally moveback and forth between groups, there is fluid shiftingof topics and interlocutor roles, and unsolicitednarratives occur.

Conclusion

Site studies allow fieldworkers to become overhearersrather than addressees, and they create contextsin which speech outside of the interview situationbecomes the norm rather than the exception. In addi-tion, site studies provide a unique cultural and

linguistic window on a community by allowing field-workers access to witness, participate in, and recordspeech events typically absent from sociolinguisticinterviews. As Text 4 demonstrates, the focus on astrategic site of linguistic interaction, rather than onindividuals or groups of people, makes it possible forfieldworkers to record the natural linguistic interac-tions of community members with each other, ratherthan with the fieldworkers.

While site studies certainly do not eliminate theobserver’s paradox, they can substantially ameliorateit. Because the sites themselves are a natural part ofthe community and the recordings made at the sitesare of natural speech, these recordings, coupled withrecordings from individual, peer group, and commu-nity fieldworkers (preferably over time), can providesociolinguists with a broad range of data for bothqualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis.

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564 Respect Vocabulary in Austronesian

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In a number of Austronesian languages, speakers re-place everyday vocabulary with a special set of wordsin order to show respect for addressees and/or refer-ents. This phenomenon fits under the broader rubricof honorifics; the term ‘honorifics’, however, includesnot only the use of respect vocabulary, but also mor-phosyntactic adjustments to speech, including specialpronouns, affixes, and verb forms (see Honorifics).Furthermore, the term is traditionally used indescriptions of non-Austronesian languages of Eastand South Asia, e.g., Japanese, Korean, Tibetan,and Thai. A well-known (and well-studied) excep-tion, however, is Javanese, an Austronesian languagespoken in Indonesia that has an elaborate honorificsystem (Errington, 1988; Geertz, 1960; Uhlenbeck,1970). Vocabulary substitution is part of the Javanesehonorific system; for example, the everyday word for‘rice’ sega, is replaced by the word sekul in the moreformal speech styles. Similarly, the respect wordtindak ‘go out’ replaces the non-honorific verbs

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anmangkat, kesah, and lunga, which also mean ‘go out’(Errington, 1988).

Within the Austronesian family, respect vocabularyhas been reported in Polynesia (Samoan, Tonga, EastFutuna, Wallisian, and previously Hawaiian, Tahi-tian, and, with a reduced lexicon, Niue), Micronesia(Namoluk, Ponapean (Pohnpeian), and formerlyKusaie (Kosraean), Marshallese, and Palauan), Indo-nesia (Alune, Bali, Javanese, Madura, Nuaulu (Northand South), Sangihe (Sangir), Sasak, Sunda, andTetun Terik (Eastern Tetun)), the Loyalty Islands(Dehu and Nengone), Fiji and Rotuma, and Mada-gascar (the southern dialects of Malagasy) (Blixon,1969; Florey and Bolton, 1997; Fox, 2005; Grimesand Maryott, 1994; Nothofer, 2000; van Klinken,1999; and Verguin, 1957).

Samoan serves as an example of how respectvocabulary is employed in a Polynesian language. InSamoan, about 450 respect words (called ‘upu fa‘aa-loalo) are substituted for everyday terms when thespeaker addresses or refers to chiefs or orators(Milner, 1961). For instance, the ordinary word fale‘house’ is replaced by maota when referring to thehouse of a chief, whereas it is substituted with laoa

Lectura Tema 2(b)-Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

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