Annals of Rediscovery

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Harry Collins, Willow Leonard-Clarke, Hannah O'Mahoney, "Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its typed transcript":

We use an extract from an interview concerning gravitational wave physics to show that the meaning of hesitancies within speech are different when spoken and when read from the corresponding transcript. When used in speech, hesitancies can indicate a pause for thought, when read in a transcript they indicate uncertainty. In a series of experiments the perceived uncertainty of the transcript was shown to be higher than the perceived uncertainty of the spoken version with almost no overlap for any respondent. We propose that finding and the method could be the beginning of a new subject we call 'Language Code Analysis' which would systematically examine how meanings change when the 'same' words are communicated via different media and symbol systems.

For my part, I've performed a series of experiments showing that the rate at which a ball rolls down an inclined plane varies, in a strikingly lawful way, with the angle of the plane to a plumb line. I propose that this finding and the method employed could be the beginning of a new subject I call "Physical Motion Analysis", which would systematically examine how position and velocity change when the same objects are subjected to different forces and constraints.

In fairness to Collins, Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University who "conceived and designed the project which emerged from his gravitational-wave studies", and to his co-authors, the bibliography of their study on how the medium affects the message does include Sachs, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974, Ochs 1979, Halliday 1985, and Clark and Fox Tree 2002. So my foundational paper on Physical Motion Analysis will have some of the relevant classic references in its bibliography as well.

 



21 Comments

  1. RW said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 5:13 am

    When used in speech, hesitancies can indicate a pause for thought, when read in a transcript they indicate uncertainty.

    I thought that seemed ungrammatical but then I realised that there's nothing in the laws of physics to support that theory.

  2. tc said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 5:38 am

    Isn't that more a case of socio-splaining?

    "I am a Professor of Social Sciences and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. I have writted for over 30 years on the sociology of gravitational wave physics."

    http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/38108-collins-harry

    [(myl) Oops, my mistake! That's what I get for posting offhandedly while doing other stuff. I'll change the title to "Annals of rediscovery"…]

  3. Bathrobe said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 6:25 am

    Why would a transcript indicate the pauses? Surely these should be edited out, unless you wanted to well and truly emphasise their presence.

    ([(myl) Transcripts intended to be read for content omit nearly all disfluencies — filled pauses, self-corrections, false starts, and so on — because transcribed disfluencies are hard to read and usually don't add usefully to the meaning, at least in a written form. But for most people, disfluencies in spontaneous speech are about as common as their most common words. The difficulty in reading transcribed disfluencies is partly because we're not used to it, but mostly I think because the prosodic cues to their status are missing.

    Sometimes dense disfluencies might indicate a speaker's confusion or concern about a topic, or serve to set off a particular word or phrase, and disfluencies are sometimes introduced into dialogue in novels for that reason. An example:

    Rocky and Lester have meantime silently moved on into the bar. “Nice seeing you again. Everything’s working out? Listen,” furtive glance after Rocky, “you won’t mention, um . . .”

    “The cash-register—”

    “Sh-shhh!”

    “Oh. Course not, why should I?”

    “It’s just that now we’re trying to go legit.”

    “Like Michael Corleone, I understand, no problem.”

    Or again:

    “Our Meat Facial today, Ms. Loeffler?”

    “Uhm, how’s that.”

    “You didn’t get our offer in the mail? on special all this week, works miracles for the complexion—freshly killed, of course, before those enzymes’ve had a chance to break down, how about it?”

    “Well, I don’t . . .”

    “Wonderful! Morris, kill . . . the chicken!”

    From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when— “Now we’ll just apply some of this,” wham! “. . . meat here, directly onto this lovely yet depleted face . . .”

    “Mmff . . .”

    “Pardon? (Easy, Morris!)”

    “Why is it . . . uh, moving around like that? Wait! is that a— are you guys putting a real dead chicken in my— aaahhh!”

    “Not quite dead yet!” Morris jovially informs the thrashing Maxine as blood and feathers fly everywhere.

    But mostly novelistic dialogue omits disfluencies, despite their high frequency in normal spontaneous speech. And transcripts of interviews always leave them out, to the immense frustration of people like me who would like to study their distribution.]

  4. Tom S. Fox said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 7:02 am

    RW, how is that ungrammatical?

  5. Joshua K. said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 8:22 am

    @Tom S. Fox: The quoted sentence would normally be considered a run-on sentence with a comma splice. Either the comma after "thought" should be replaced with a semicolon, or it should be followed by the word "and" or "but".

  6. Brett said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 8:36 am

    I was just struck by the side-by-side use of the spellings "um" and "er."

  7. Jen said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 8:52 am

    Tom S. Fox: I think the second comma would be better as a semicolon (or full stop), but I'm prepared to be told I'm wrong!

  8. Jerry Friedman said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 9:10 am

    I realize that a great deal has been said about the meaning of "meaning" in the past century or so, and I've missed most of it. But do people really say that the meaning is simply and unproblematically what is understood by listeners or readers? That's the impression I get from the passage quoted above, or in other words, that's what the passage quoted above means.

    If we're doing prescriptive grammar, I'd prescribe "the meanings of hesitancies are different".

    [(myl) Interesting point. The main traditional distinction is between meaning as something that words and sentence have vs. meaning as something that people do. This roughly follows the distribution of subjects of the verb "to mean", but of course the case of speaker meaning naturally implies consideration of audience uptake. So we can ask what speakers "mean" by their communicative choices — though of course this is variable, complex, and ambiguous — but we can also ask what those choices mean to their audience, or to some other audience real or imaginary.]

  9. mollymooly said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 11:17 am

    I recall an Irish Sunday newspaper about 20 years ago where a journalist interviewing a Catholic prelate made him look rather foolish simply by transcribing a good number of his disfluencies in the printed article.

  10. Joe said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 12:07 pm

    "Sociology of Gravitational Wave Physics"? With some quantification of "uncertainty" thrown in? Perhaps this is another Sokal Hoax…

  11. Guy said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 3:53 pm

    I think a comma splice is fine here since the two clauses have parallel structure and are meant to contrast, so they can be viewed as asyndetically coordinated. But the presence of a comma after the first "when" adjunct but not after the second is distracting and calls attention to the punctuation. If it's chosen to have commas in both, rather than neither, a semicolon might be better to keep the levels of division more explicit.

  12. Adrian Morgan said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 7:50 pm

    In a university assignment years ago (a 2003 interview with a 2nd language learner of Japanese, FWIW) I went to the trouble of including a 140-word "transcription policy", to excuse myself for removing filled pauses, etc. It includes phrases like "selectively removed when they do not seem to the interviewer to serve any useful semantic purpose" and "no rigorous attempt has been made to be consistent".

    @Brett The spellings "um" and "er" are overwhelmingly the most usual in Australian English, and very frequent in British English too. To my ear, "erm" sounds annoyed, and I would never use it to indicate anything other than a stern note of disapproval.

  13. Robert Furber said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 8:00 pm

    As a British English speaker, I find that um and er are used in transcription most frequently. I would write erm if the vowel sound is more drawn out than a simple um.

  14. AntC said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 8:44 pm

    Thanks @tc.

    the sociology of gravitational wave physics Is that a thing? With all the savage cutbacks alleged in UK Higher Education, you can still hold tenure doing only (or chiefly) that?

    How many gravitational wave physicists are there, anway? I'd be surprised it's enough to do meaningful sociology.

    No wonder Prof Collins feels the need to spread himself about a bit.

  15. AntC said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 9:23 pm

    @myl Oops, my mistake! I don't think you should rush to apologise. This one's a purler:

    We believe the general meaning-relationship of different ways of representing ‘the same’ words is a new subject for investigation which, as far as we know, has not been thought about in this broad way. ["representing" means the medium: written (transcript/with disfluencies/formalised), spoken/reported, recorded/played back, …]

    Did the whole 'the medium is the message' pass them by?

  16. j said,

    September 20, 2016 @ 11:16 pm

    Has nobody noticed the apparent typo 'writted' for 'written' in the bio? (I checked; it's on the university website, not introduced here on LL.)

  17. tangent said,

    September 21, 2016 @ 1:11 am

    Does "Distinguished" mean "Emeritus"?

  18. Rakau said,

    September 21, 2016 @ 3:37 am

    This interesting. I am a trial lawyer. When a jury retires to make its decision it is invariably provided with a transcript of the oral evidence given in the course of the trial. In lengthy trials juries must rely heavily on the transcripts of evidence when trying to recall what witnesses have said and making credibility assessments. The difference between pausing to think and pausing because of uncertainty can be significant. It could be the difference between an acquittal and a conviction.

    [(myl) In my limited experience of such transcripts (which in the U.S. are generally prepared by professional transcriptionists in quasi-real-time with some post-editing), they are to a variable extent "cleaned up", with disfluencies of various sorts left out or removed. The transcripts can be problematic in more fundamental ways when the speaker's variety of English was very different from the transcriptionist's — or just because of errors introduced for other reasons by the transcriptionists, who generally do a very good job at a very difficult task, but are after all only human. And even if all the words, disfluencies, and non-speech vocalizations are as faithfully represented as orthographic conventions permit, a lot of potentially relevant delivery is still by definition omitted.

    Good technology exists for presenting a transcript time-aligned with an audio recording — see the presentation of SCOTUS oral arguments at oyez.org, e.g. here, for a simple example — and perhaps some day juries will get to see/hear transcripts in that form.]

  19. AntC said,

    September 21, 2016 @ 5:59 am

    @Rakau's comment is perhaps wrt the paper's lengthy example of the Bentley case in the UK (1950's. Bentley was hanged on the basis of police reports of what he said to an accomplice who shot a policeman. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Bentley_case)

    It all turned on how Bentley might or might not have said "let him have it".

    Again curiously out of touch for the paper to dwell on that exmple. Jurisprudence and rules of evidence have advanced in the past 60 years, methinks.

  20. Bill Benzon said,

    September 21, 2016 @ 8:32 am

    Over the past few years I've transcribed spoken language, interviews (some of which I've conducted) or presentations available on YouTube (like Dan Dennett) and I've been amazed at the disfluencies that show up. You don't notice them in conversation because you're paying attention to what is being said, not how it's being said.

    Transcription is a different ball of wax. Since I'm transcribing for content I eliminate most disfluencies, though I don't go so far as to correct grammar. But, were I to attempt to transcribe the disfluencies…my mind boggles at the prospect of representing those sounds. I'm sure a trained linguist would have better means available, and also, I would hope, more flexible and precisely timed playback technology. Stopping, rewinding, and starting YouTube videos is annoying and wastes LOTS of time.

    [(myl) Try using some of the software designed for the purpose, like Transcriber or Elan.]

  21. Jerry Friedman said,

    September 21, 2016 @ 9:59 pm

    AntC: There are over a thousand people on the team that detected gravitational waves, and there are other teams hoping to do so, according to this New Yorker article. I imagine that's enough for sociology—but there must have been far fewer thirty years ago.

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