Spontaneous conversation

Wolfson (1976: 195) argues that the “spontaneous interview is not, however, a speech event”, and therefore may not yield natural speech.

Wolfson (1976) argues that having a conversation with an interviewer cannot be spontaneous as the event is not a recognisable one within a speech community. However, the interviews are not ‘valueless’ as Wolfson (1976) goes on later to mention. Building a relationship with the participants can help among other factors to create more natural speech.

Wolfson (1976) also suggests that having more than one participant can

aid spontaneous speech. Wolfson (1976: 199) quotes Labov in saying that the most “powerful determinant of verbal behaviour” is one that is in a familiar social situation. The paper then goes on to accept that group interaction can direct attention away from the fact that the participants are taking part in an interview. Where possible, I have paired up participants with one or more friends or family members in order to create a casual conversation. There were two occasions where I interviewed one to one;

this was due to dropouts.

The strengths of the face-to-face qualitative interview are well highlighted by Braun and Clarke (2013: 80). The following table outlines the strengths and limitations put forward by Braun and Clarke with my own thoughts on how my project fits into these categories (the headings and ideas are taken from Braun and Clarke 2013: 80):

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Table 14: Strengths and limitations of face-to-face qualitative interviews, adapted from Braun and Clarke (2013: 80)

The interview itself followed a semi-structured pattern with a reflexive or open construction. The conversation questions have been adapted from Barry (1984) and Pressley (2002) and their interviews with Manx residents.

Strengths Limitations

Rich and Detailed Data

Allowed me to compare many different target phonemes with past research and offer a breadth of different MxE features.

Time Consuming

Finding participants and interview length was considered with regards to sample size and the time allotted for the project.

Flexible

Some questions were answered more fully than others; with my prompts I was able to move conversation in line with participants preferences

Lack of breadth

In terms of conversation style, I think that having more than one participant at the interview introduced different levels of formality into the conversation Smaller Samples

The smaller sample allowed for more in-depth analysis of conversation, permitting for some qualitative and quantitative data

Time Consuming for Participants By pre-warning participants about the interview time, I believe that they and I have realistic expectations about the length of conversation

Accessible

By using the friend of a friend approach, and inviting a friend to the interview I was able to obtain enough participants (see 3.1.1 for more)

Lack of Anonymity

The participants who accept to do the interview may be more extroverted than those who are unwilling. This may skew the results as I analyse only these personality types. Necessary steps were taken to hide the identities of everyone who took part (names/places and identifiers were all bleeped out of conversation)

Researcher Control

Useful to steer conversations into topics where target words may be, for example when looking to elicit words with <oo>

orthography I asked participants about education to elicit words like school or book

Not necessarily ‘empowering’ for participants

I tried to allow participants free speech and time to answer questions about themselves. There will always be an interviewer /interviewee relationship, however I made some attempts to limit power roles within the interviews (see 3.6 for more discussion)

Tagliamonte (2006) suggests a funnelling approach to the sequence of questions. The questions would be best ordered going from general to specific. During the interviews I would always ask ‘how was your day?’

as a warm up question, then quite general and open questions about living on the Island and school days. Then, I may delve into more detailed issues such as Manx identity (See Appendix 1 for question/prompt sheet).

The most important strategy of a sociolinguistic interview is “to record one to two hours of speech and a full range of demographic data for each speaker within one’s sample design” (Tagliamonte 2006: 37). Labov’s (1984) design of sociolinguistic interviews involved certain modules. Each module contained a topic and a series of ordered questions which is referred to as the ‘interview schedule’ (Labov 1984). As mentioned earlier, a funnelling approach is apparent with the questions; starting with general and moving to more specific. Labov (1984) believed that certain questions would elicit a storytelling style that would provide ‘rich’ vernacular.

Tagliamonte explains that:

The ideal structure of a sociolinguistic interview is to begin with questions relating to demography, community, neighbourhood, etc. and progress into more personal modules such as Dating, Dreams and Fear. If you are going to be including a module on Language, always put it at the very end of the interview when your informant has exhausted all the more personal topics (2006: 38)

135 The interview modules are laid out in appendix 1. The modules begin with demography (local area / school / neighbourhood) and then move to more personal questions about identity. Within the topic areas the questions are designed to elicit a storytelling style (for example: “what are some good memories of ______ (school)?”).

The interviewer’s part must of course be minimal during the interaction.

If the recording is mostly the interviewer then it will not gain the appropriate amount of data. During the interview an interviewer can offer their own experience, follow the main subject areas, seem interested, take an insider’s viewpoint and also be a learner (Tagliamonte 2006). There is a fine line to being the interviewer. I brought with me my own knowledge of the IoM to be able to relate to what the participants were saying. Also, I had to be interested and ask follow-up questions to familiar subjects.

Again, the main aim is to keep the participants talking. During the interview, I also had to keep the conversation flowing and informal.

Finally, flexibility is key (Tagliamonte 2006). The interview questionnaire is labelled as ‘prompt questions’ because conversation must not be too rigid. During my interviews, some participants would want to talk less or more about certain subjects than others. Of course, this was taken into consideration; for example, one participant said they did not have a great time at school, I did not press them on this subject.

Within the interview situation participants were mainly paired with friends and family (see interview pairings in appendix 2). As mentioned

previously, the interviewer did not share the same linguistic background as the participants. Both these points may have some impact in terms of accommodation. The accommodation theory suggests that individuals can change their style of speaking to more or less like the audience they are talking to (Crystal 2008). The interview structure may have been an opportunity for the participants to display both convergence (whereby

“individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors” (Giles et al.

1991: 7)) in speaking styles with each other and divergence (whereby

“speakers accentuate speech and nonverbal differences between themselves and others” (Giles et al. 1991: 8)) with the interviewer.

Convergence and divergence are not seen as mutually exclusive and can be found to work concurrently (The observer’s paradox is discussed in detail, in section 3.6). With this in mind, I attempted to stay out of conversation as much as possible and let the participants talk to each other.