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counter on the transcriber, I noted the sections of each tape at which such
episodes began and ended.
As I noted earlier (see Chapter 3), the concept of episode has been
employed frequently in studies addressing ongoing discourse (e. g. Katriel 1986;
Malone 1997; Tannen 1984; Watson and Potter 1962) as well as those more
specifically concerned with facework (e. g. Penman 1990; Wood and Kroger
1991). The term however is quite a fuzzy one, and implies an objective and
bounded period of interaction which is normally ill defined in studies applying
the term. I did not employ any formal criteria as such beyond treating an
episode as a period of interaction where participants were'doing' some
common conversational topic together whereby they shared a common
cognitive and conversational focus of attention. In this sense, I focused on
topics that became 'conversational', that is, topics that were picked up and
developed by participants. Similar to Tannen (1984), 1 used instances of
focused topic talk as the basis for delineating 'sociable 'episode'. In the light of
the propositions set out in Chapter 3,1 assumed that such a criteria for episode
selection would yield instances of both negative and positive alignment.
Having audited the tapes and identified suitable conversational episodes,
I gave each one a'working title', e. g. 'Good and bad pubs', or'Unemployment',
and made brief analytical notes, noting salient aspects of talk such as how the
topic was framed (e. g. in a serious or humorous manner), in how far participants
were displaying solidarity of differentiation (i. e. positively or negatively aligning),
and any particular images of self that were being proffered and sustained over
the course of such episodes of talk (e. g. knowledgeable expert or humorous
storyteller). Alongside helping me to identify a manageable 'sample frame', this
process gave me an overall 'feel' for the interaction and presentational stances
in both gatherings.
The next step was to playback the selected segments and roughly
transcribe the talk. I was primarily concerned here with providing as accurate a
representation as possible of what was actually said. Alongside verbatim
transcription, I included characteristics such as noticeably increased volume
and speed of speaker turns, as well as overlap, and non-lexical phenomenon
JOR