Transcription Issues in Current Linguistic Research

Methodological and theoretical developments in several subfields of linguistics have led many linguists to draw increasingly on the data of spoken language as a primary source for a wide range of scholarly investigations. From the emerging focus on language documentation, field linguistics, and endangered languages, to the growing emphasis on corpus-based analysis of grammar, to phonologists' longstanding interest in prosody, many are finding that naturalistic recordings of spoken language are of vital importance for addressing their current research questions. As linguists take up new kinds of research projects, many involving multimodal digital technologies that have only recently become widely available, they are beginning to confront with greater urgency the issue of how spoken data are to be represented in visual form. For researchers who have not previously drawn extensively on ordinary conversation as a primary source of data, such questions may be new; by the same token, although well-established tools of transcription already exist in subdisciplines that use elicitation techniques in data collection, new issues arise when data sets are extended to include unelicited spoken language and longer stretches of discourse. Yet transcription remains largely undiscussed in many areas of the field. For example, advance publicity for the recent 2005 LSA Summer Institute conference on " Language Documentation: Theory, Practice, and Values " noted that " the quality of documentation available for an endangered language can determine the success " of revitalization and other programs. Although the conference addressed such important documentation issues as digital technologies, archiving, and preservation of data, it did not, apparently, include any sessions or individual papers devoted specifically to problems of transcription. In the field of linguistics, the need is there—though not always recognized— for a thoroughgoing reassessment of the state of the art in the transcription of spoken language for linguistic research. The time is ripe to focus attention on the role of transcription in creating the data representations that our linguistic research depends on. These are the needs that will be addressed by this session on " Transcription Issues in Current Linguistic Research. " On one level, transcription seems simple: you write down what you hear. But linguists know that there is more to it, to the extent that linguistic theory is inherently bound up in the process. For example, among the theoretical issues which impact transcription are the representation of contrasts, categories, hierarchies, predictable patterns, rules, and so on. Transcription is not …