116 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
as product versus text as process. Text 1 is a prepared text and so should
more easily comply with the grammatical rules set out in Brazil (1995).
Text 2 is a (semi-scripted) spontaneous monologue which should allow
scope for the testing of the methods suggested in the previous chapter for
transcribing ellipsis and dysfl uency.^1
Text 1 and Text 2 were listened to and transcribed orthographically by
the author. The orthographic transcripts are presented in Appendix 2 and
it will be noticed that both texts are unpunctuated: capital letters are only
used to indicate proper nouns and the personal pronoun I. Some very minor
editing of the texts was conducted in order to remove small dysfl uencies
in Blair’s renditions of the two texts. The orthographic transcriptions given
to the readers were unpunctuated to ensure that punctuation neither con-
strained their tonality divisions (Tench 1996: 51–2), nor the segmentation of
their speech into increments.
All the readers who volunteered to take part in the readings were
students studying at the Centre for Language and Communication
Research at Cardiff University. All are native English speakers with nine
being English, one Canadian and one a New Zealander.^2 The readers
were given the orthographic transcriptions, plus some brief contextual
information explaining the contexts in which the two texts had been
produced, two days prior to their reading and instructed to read through
the texts in order to familiarize themselves with their contents. They
were encouraged to make notations on their copies of their transcrip-
tions which they felt would help them read the texts aloud. Most of the
readers notated their copies of Texts 1 and 2 prior to their reading the
texts aloud.
The recordings took place in a university sound studio at a pre-arranged
time with only the reader and the author present. Each individual recording
session was scheduled for 15 minutes which allowed suffi cient time for a
brief warm-up chat which aimed to relax the readers prior to their reading
and allowed for a short break between the recording of Texts 1 and 2. The
readers were instructed to read the texts aloud as if they were delivering the
speeches in the contexts in which the texts were originally produced. They
were explicitly told that they were not to attempt to mimic the speaking
style of Prime Minister Blair but to read the texts in their normal reading
voice. Each reader was recorded reading both texts using a NAGRA ARES-BB
digital recorder. The recordings were later converted into Wav fi les which
were analysed.