The interviewer begins with a declarative, initiating what he expects to be a conventional adjacency pair; we can presume that he expects a direct affirmative in response to the statement that she ‘must be one of Britain’s only roads (.) women road sweepers’. However, Mrs Cook does not immediately respond; instead she initiates a side sequence with her imperative ‘well for a start call me Ame’. There are several reasons why she might side-step the implied question in this way and delay completing the expected adjacency pair: perhaps she does not like the abrupt formality of the interviewer’s opening sequence with its lack of phatic utterance and decides to use the side sequence to create a more informal atmosphere for the interview; perhaps she uses it as a means of gaining control over the interviewer and situation; perhaps she objects to being seen only as a road sweeper and wants to divert the focus of the interview on to her as an individual for a moment. Alternatively, she may genuinely wish to decrease the social distance between herself and the interviewer, with the aim to lower the level of formality of the situation: his formal mode of address, using her title ‘Mrs’, is a negative politeness strategy which she appears to reject early on in the transcript.
Whatever Mrs Cook’s reasons, the side sequence certainly has an impact on the interviewer. He reframes his initial declarative ‘you must be’ to an interrogative ‘are you’, which seems much more confrontational and designed to force Mrs Cook to respond how he wants this time. This slightly aggressive confrontational attitude can also be detected when he uses a tag question in the utterance ‘well you’re not a road sweeper then are you’. He also seems a little flustered by the side sequence, repeating the same repair as he made in the first line ‘road sweepers women road sweepers’, and he is forced to correct himself. It would appear that the start of the interview is not as structured as he anticipated or indeed desired. Usually in an interview, we would expect the conversation to be structured around adjacency pairs, typically questions and extended responses. Once Mrs Cook has made her point about how she wishes to be addressed, the structure of the interview falls into its conventional pattern.
As we would expect from this type of exchange, Mrs Cook’s utterances are lengthier and more expressive than those of her interviewer. Moreover, her distinctive accent and dialect are represented through the lexical, grammatical and syntactical variations she makes throughout her utterances. A sense of Mrs Cook’s Gloucestershire roots is partly conveyed through the representation of her accent in words such as the noun ‘zineposties’ and abbreviated forms such as the subordinating conjunction ‘cos’ and the third person pronoun ‘em’. However, the main way we gain such a strong impression of Mrs Cook’s regional identity is through her use of dialectal lexis. For example, she uses the non-standard dynamic verb ‘scorting’ and the archaic pronoun ‘thee’, neither of which we would expect in contemporary standard English but which are characteristic of a regional dialect. Similarly her substitution of personal pronouns is interesting to note: ‘our dad said to I’ is chosen rather than ‘my dad said to me’.
Apart from her choice of individual words, Mrs Cook also uses non-standard grammar such as the contraction ‘ain’t’ in marked contrast to the interviewer’s standard ‘isn’t’ and the declarative ‘they been’t too bad’ for ‘they aren’t too bad’. Similarly, the use of ellipsis in the utterance ‘in the winter put down the grit’ and the double negative ‘it ain’t no good’ are typical of her dialect, as is her use of non-standard syntax in the declarative ‘it’s got grass-cutting to do’. Mrs Cook also interchanges the singular and the plural, for example ‘they was paying’ and ‘the kids is on top of the lane’.
In contrast to Mrs Cook, the interviewer gives no sign of an accent in his utterances, nor are there any dialectal features in his register. At times, he appears to struggle to understand some of Mrs Cook’s utterances, for example her initial pronunciation of the noun ‘signposts’ as ‘zineposties’. His one-word interrogative ‘what’ seems somewhat sharp in context and lacks politeness, particularly when coupled with the condescending interjection ‘indeed’. The interviewer’s response to her accent here could be interpreted as face threatening in nature; however, later in the transcript, he appears to downwardly converge with the uncharacteristically informal noun phrases ‘mucky lot’, ‘clean lot’ and ‘dirty lot’. Whether his intention is to decrease social distance and make Mrs Cook more at ease or to highlight his own superiority by deliberately adopting a more simplistic register, is difficult to ascertain. His use of fillers and non-fluent pausing leading up to the topic shift ‘mm (.) yes (.) well (.)’ seem to suggest that he is either losing interest in the topic or is struggling to develop the interview. Either way, the non-fluency features typical of spontaneous speech reveal a level of unease at the very least.
In conclusion, the transcript is interesting to analyse in terms of turn-taking, relationships between the speakers and the strong elements of regional accent and dialect. It is a mistake to dismiss dialect speakers as ‘uneducated’ people who don’t use ‘proper’ English. In fact, dialects are interesting and valid varieties of English. After all, Mrs Cook comes across here as a hard-working, confident woman who is more than capable of conversing with an overtly formal, standard English-speaking interviewer and is proud of her regional identity.
by
alexlawrance (student)
