556 Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

these practices make intentionality of both speech

and thought possible.
An account of this sort will succeed only if notions
of correctness, entitlement, commitment, and so
on, can themselves be understood in non-intentional
and non-semantic terms. If we must presuppose that
the relevant performances both the utterances themselves and others attitudes toward these utterances
are meaningful, if, for example, we must presuppose
that these performances either involve the use of antecedently meaningful expressions or consist in actions
produced with certain intentions in mind, then their
meaningfulness does not reside in, or result from, the
conforming and censuring practices themselves. The
project fails if the social practices that supposedly
confer meaning cannot be explained without presupposing that the performances governed by these practices have meaning. It is not obvious that this
explanatory burden has been discharged.

A Non-Reductive Proposal
A non-reductive construal of the norms-based project
is possible. One might see the task of articulating the
structure of the norms governing overt speech as
exposing how the intentionality of thought and the
(public) norms governing overt speech are intimately
connected. Such an account would aim to show
that we cannot understand representation, in either
language or thought, without a notion of inference,
that is, without the idea of certain claims entitling or
justifying others. (This idea is a cornerstone of the
CRS developed by Wilfred Sellars.) On this construal,
the project is an attempt to work out the interconnections between language and thought, without taking
either as basic.

See also: Mentalese.

Bibliography
Block N (1986). Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology. In French P A, Uehling T E Jr & Wettstein H K
(eds.) Midwest studies in philosophy 10: Studies in the
Philosophy of Mind. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Brandom R B (1994). Making it explicit: reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cummins R (1989). Meaning and mental representation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davidson D (1984). Inquiries into truth and interpretation.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fodor J A (1990). A theory of content, I, II. In Fodor J A
(ed.) A theory of content and other essays. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. 51136.
Frege G (1892). On sense and reference. Black M (trans.).
Reprinted in Ludlow P (ed.). Readings in the philosophy
of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 563583.
Grice H P (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review 66,
377388.
Millikan R (1984). Language, thought, and other biological
categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Putnam H (1975). The meaning of meaning. In Putnam H
(ed.) Philosophical papers, vol. 2. Mind, language,
and reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
215271.
Sellars W (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.
In Scriven M, Feyerabend P & Maxwell G (eds.) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 253329.
Stich S P & Warfield T A (eds.) (1994). Mental representation: a reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

P Cukor-Avila, University of North Texas, Denton,
TX, USA
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Defining the Issue

Perhaps the most important challenge for linguists
who study language in its social context is to devise
a methodology that allows them to record the everyday linguistic behavior of their informants, i.e., the
casual, unmonitored speech that normally occurs outside of the sociolinguistic interview (Labov, 1966,

1972a). However, the typical sociolinguistic interview is an unnatural speech event interviews are
often set up in advance; many of the conversations
are between fieldworkers and interviewees and not
among the interviewees themselves; and in most cases
the fieldworker, who is often a stranger to the interviewee and to the community itself, controls the
topics and conversational turns. Moreover, the presence of an observer (a fieldworker with a recording
device) creates an unnatural context for informal
conversation, resulting in what Labov (1966) referred
to as the observers paradox (the skewing of linguis-

Researching Naturally Occurring Speech 557

tic behavior toward norms of correctness as a result

of the mere presence of a fieldworker). As a result, the
interview itself creates a situation where obtaining
the most casual speech styles is difficult at best.

Approaches to Fieldwork
Community Fieldworkers

Over the past four decades sociolinguists have

designed varying approaches to fieldwork in an effort
to mitigate the effects of the observers paradox.
Because the social and ethnic barriers between fieldworkers and informants are often cited as key factors
that could affect stylistic variation, one popular
approach has been to use fieldworkers who are either
community members, ethnically similar, or in the best
scenario, both. Labov (1972b) was one of the first
researchers to use same-race community members as
fieldworkers to record the use of African American
Vernacular English (AAVE) by adolescents in Harlem.
Wolfram (1974) in Mississippi, Wolfram, and
Christian (1976) in Appalachia, and most recently
Rickford and McNair-Knox (1994) in East Palo Alto
have all used similar fieldwork strategies.
While differences in data from community and noncommunity members have not been systematically
investigated (although recent work by Bell, 2001
touches on this issue), Rickford and McNair-Knox
(1994) have tested the hypothesis of same-race fieldworkers through a quantitative comparison of the
use of five African American Vernacular English
(AAVE) features by an urban African American teenager in interviews conducted by both an African
American and an Anglo fieldworker. They show that
the teenagers use of AAVE features is significantly
higher in the interview conducted by the African
American fieldworker, and conclude that the race of
the interviewer accounts for this discrepancy.
Research by Cukor-Avila and Bailey (2001), however, suggests that other factors, including interview
context and familiarity of the interview participants,
might have influenced Rickford and McNair-Knoxs
results. For example, when the African American
fieldworker recorded her interview her teenage
daughter, who went to the same school as the interviewee, accompanied her. These two young women
functioned as a kind of peer group during the interview. In contrast, the Anglo fieldworker, who had not
previously met the teenager, was the only person
present during the interview. Cukor-Avila and Baileys
data from parallel interviews with rural Texas speakers show that when interview context and familiarity
of the interview participants remain constant, there is
no significant difference in the use of AAVE features

for two female speakers (one teenage and one elderly)

when interviewed by African American community
members and when interviewed by an Anglo fieldworker who had spent several years in the community. In fact, the only statistically significant difference
they found was in the use of invariant be by the
teenage girl who used it more frequently with
the Anglo fieldworker. Their results suggest that any
effects the race of the interviewer might typically
have on vernacular use can be minimized when fieldworkers have spent time in the community and are
familiar with community norms (see discussion
below).
Peer Group Recordings

Another strategy frequently used by fieldworkers

to reduce the effects of the observers paradox is to
record subjects in peer group contexts. Labov et al.
(1968) used this strategy in conjunction with a community fieldworker in interviews conducted with
African Americans and Puerto Ricans in New York
City. Blom and Gumperz (1986), Cheshire (1982),
Eckert (1989), Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1996),
and Childs and Mallinson (2004) have all systematically incorporated interviews with peer groups into
their fieldwork. They used groups that self-select,
and, like Milroy (1987a,b), interviewed these
groups in places where they naturally congregate.
Fieldwork in Philadelphia (Labov, 1984) extended
the community fieldworker approach with the addition of a set of question modules designed to control
the topics of conversation. Fieldworkers can often
manipulate topics in order to direct the conversation
to subjects that lead to more spontaneous speech.
This strategy has also been used to create conversational contexts for interviewees to use targeted
forms, e.g., beVing, as in She be tellin me what
to do an I dont like it, for AAVE speakers (Bailey
and Maynor, 1987, 1989). (For a criticism of this
strategy, see Wolfram, 1987.)
Ethnographic Fieldwork

Sociolinguists have also incorporated the techniques

of participant observation used by ethnographers
(cf. Geertz, 1973; Spradley, 1980; Schieffelin, 1979;
Eckert, 1989) into their fieldwork. In an ethnographic
approach fieldworkers:
. Invest a substantial amount of time in a community.
They delve deeply into a community by visiting
there frequently over an extended period of time
(or by living there), and by participating in everyday
community activities.
. Document and record the everyday language of a
community in its cultural context.

558 Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

. Capture actual linguistic interaction rather than

surrogates for interaction.
. Continually evaluate observations of and information gathered from community members, thereby
allowing the linguistic data to be interpreted within
the context of the cultural behavior and knowledge
of the community.
Participant-observation may be one of the best ways
to reduce the effects of the observers paradox and to
document the linguistic interactions of community
members with each other, rather than with fieldworkers. This is because the more time fieldworkers
spend in a community interacting with residents on
a daily basis, the more they will be trusted and the less
they will be perceived as outsiders. Both Baugh
(1983) and Dayton (1996) have made effective use
of participant-observation in their studies of AAVE
speakers in Los Angeles (Baugh) and Philadelphia
(Dayton); however, they typically did not tape their
observations. Thus, their data are limited to the
observations they could make on the spot and record
on note cards shortly thereafter. As is shown in the
examples below, informal conversations can be taped
within the context of ethnographic fieldwork.

An Ethno-Linguistic Approach to
Fieldwork
What follows is an overview of an approach to fieldwork that is both ethnographic and linguistic.
This approach was developed during the course of a
longitudinal study in the rural Texas community
of Springville (the name of the community and the
names of informants mentioned in the examples
below are all pseudonyms), designed to document
linguistic variation and change in rural Southern
speech over time (see Cukor-Avila, 1995; CukorAvila and Bailey, 1995; and Bailey and Cukor-Avila,
forthcoming for a complete discussion of the history
of Springville and the methodology of the Springville
project). The approach applies insights from ethnography to sociolinguistic fieldwork and demonstrates
how sociolinguists can shift the focus of study to the
community itself, consequently allowing the recording of people as they normally interact with each other
on a daily basis. More specifically, this approach
records people in normal sites of linguistic interaction
with one another rather than with fieldworkers, talking about topics that they normally talk about and
involved in the kinds of speech events they normally
participate in.

The Community of Springville

Springville is a contemporary relic of the plantation
agriculture that developed during tenancy and was
typical of the post-Civil War South; in fact, many of
the communitys approximately 150 residents either
worked as tenant farmers or are their descendents.
Most of the land and almost all of the houses are
owned by one woman, who also owns the only store
in town. She maintains financial control over much of
the community many residents borrow money from
her and purchase items from the store on credit,
reconciling their tabs on the first of the month after
she cashes their government checks.
The significance of the store for the residents of
Springville is not unique. The country store in the
post-Civil War South played a major part in shaping
the lives of rural people and served as the foundation
for the economy of the New South (Ayers, 1992).
The role that the store plays in Springville was the
most important consideration in the development of
the field methods used throughout the project. The
store is not only the principal place of business in the
community, but more importantly, it is also the primary community hangout. It provides a meeting
place for people to gossip, watch soap operas, eat
lunch, read their mail, or simply just pass the time.
This is especially true on days when rainy weather
prevents people from working in the fields.
The Springville Project

The Springville Project relied on three techniques to

ameliorate the effects of the observers paradox:
1. Multiple interviews with informants.
2. Interviews in which informants interacted with
each other rather than or in addition to fieldworkers.
3. The use of community fieldworkers.
Most fieldworkers know that subsequent interviews
with informants usually produce more unguarded
conversations and speech more like that used when
no fieldworker is present. The Springville Project
applied this observation as an organizing principle:
people were interviewed as many times as possible,
not only over a period of years (for longitudinal
purposes), but also within the same year (to increase
the familiarity between interviewer and interviewee).
What made this approach possible, of course, was the
extensive amount of time that fieldworkers Patricia
Cukor-Avila and Guy Bailey spent in the community. Cukor-Avilas daily visits to Springville over a
two-month period and frequent return visits by both
Cukor-Avila and Bailey over the years have provided

Researching Naturally Occurring Speech 559

many opportunities for additional interviews. The

effects of subsequent interviews can be dramatic, as
Texts 1 and 2 below demonstrate.
Multiple Interviews Over Time

Text 1 was recorded July 12, 1988, and is the first

interview Cukor-Avila conducted with Vanessa, an
African American female born in 1961.
Text 1
CA: What time do you, what time does the store
open? Like what time do you work from?
V: I come at eight an get off at four thirty.
CA: Uh huh. So what do your kids do while theyre
at home? What do they do during the daytime
when theyre not in school?
V: Well they jus got outta summer school an they
jus, they haven been doin too much of
anything but layin aroun watchin TV an
fussin an fightin an callin over here
for me. [laughs]
CA: Oh yeah you can hear em I bet.
V: Yeah.
CA: So what kinda stuff do they fight over? Now
lemme see now, tell me whos the oldest? The
boy or the girl?
V: The girl.
CA: An then the next one is . . .
V: Is the boy an the girl.
CA: Uh huh, so who fights with who?
V: It be, it be mostly the baby fightin with the
oldes girl. She jealous. She always want
things to go her way. An when it dont she
wanna fight em. So its the baby always
wanna fight.
CA: Uh huh. So what about the boy? What does he
play, referee?
V: Yeah, he do. He uh, hes, hes like the man of the
house. He watch over them an when they get
to fussin too much he get on em. He keeps
em in order.

Recorded shortly after Cukor-Avila first met Vanessa,

the text reflects classic interview style and follows a
simple question/answer format, with Vanessa answering all of the questions but providing little elaboration.
While the interview (and even this short text) includes
a number of vernacular features, no one would argue
that it reflects the everyday speech that Vanessa uses
when no fieldworker is present. A second interview
recorded a week later demonstrates the advantages
of follow-up interviews. Vanessas responses are
much more elaborate, and she provides an unsolicited
narrative on a rather personal topic. It is more like the
everyday speech that the fieldworkers had observed
Vanessa using with other Springville residents.

The next passage, recorded nine years later, (March

13, 1997) after many visits with Vanessa, is less like
an interview and more like a conversation between
two friends. The interviewee feels free to change and
initiate topics, and she assumes that the fieldworker
has a repository of shared knowledge regarding the
characters in the narrative. Both Vanessas language
and her linguistic interactions are much like what she
had been observed using on numerous occasions with
friends and family in Springville.
Text 2
V:

They some nuts. I cant stan em. I had to go

over there an, an, an uh with my gun an
trip out on them about her.
CA: What? What happened?
V: R called me one night an she say, Aunt V, she
say, Im tired of them runnin over P.
Say it was C tried to jump on her firs an then
the sisters an then the mama was cussin her
out. I told R about it that night an P was over
here. I say, This is it. I say, Im fit to go
over here an front these people an let them
know that she got somebody that love her an
if they keep messin with her I will shoot em.
So I got my gun. They say, We ain gonna let
you go by yourself.
So B, R, an P went with me. I went over there
an knocked, I knocked on the door. An they
say, Who is it? I say, Its Vanessa. Come
in. I say, No Im not comin in. Yall come
outside. So she opened the door. I say,
Lookie here. Im tired of yall messin with
my child. If, if you dont want her here or shes
not welcome around here Ill take her home
with me right now.
I said, But yall not gonna keep runnin over her
an keep fightin her an keep cussin her
because I will shoot you. An Im not gonna
play with yall. An the nex time that I hafta
come out here by my child Im comin an Im
gon be ready to do somethin to all of yall.
Ohhh they were scared. And uh, an I was
sayin, If you dont like what Im sayin come
on out here an we can jus, we can do
whatever we gotta do tonight an get it over
with.
Ohhh they were scared Patricia. They closed the
door on me an I asked P. I said, P. do you
wanna come home? [mimics] No. I say,
You so crazy. I said, But you gonna cry an
you gonna wish you hada came home with
me. An sure enough in a month time she
came home. I say, Im not gonna put up no
more with yalls junk. An everytime they see
me they still scared of me.
I wasn playin with em. I was tired of it. An,
an I, I guess they kep doin her wrong

560 Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

because you know they, I guess they felt like
that nobody, you know, she didn have
nobody to care about her an stuff. I wen an
let them know thats my child an youre not
gonna keep doin her wrong. Uh huh.
Peer Group Interviews

As useful as multiple interviews with informants

are for ameliorating the observers paradox, they
still involve an interviewer talking to an interviewee.
Linguists have frequently used group interviews as a
mechanism for creating situations in which informants talk to one another. Group interviews have
been used most often with teenagers and adolescents
(cf. Labov, 1968, 1972b), but the Springville Project
extended this mechanism to adults and used it as
an organizing principle for fieldwork. Moreover,
the priority of the Springville Project was recording naturally occurring groups rather than groups
brought together by the fieldworkers specifically for
an interview. Multiple interviews, an ethnolinguistic
approach to fieldwork, and the frequent presence of
the fieldworkers in the community were crucial in
identifying and recording these naturally occurring
groups.
Text 3, which is from an interview with two
African American males born in 1913, is an example
of a recording with a naturally occurring peer group,
while the circumstances that led to the interview
illustrate how interviews such as these come about.
Cukor-Avila first met Wallace in July 1988 while
she was interviewing another Springville resident.
During the course of that interview Wallace, who
was selling vegetables, drove up, was introduced to
Cukor-Avila, and joined in the conversation. CukorAvila and Bailey subsequently interviewed Wallace
individually on five occasions over the next three
weeks. Wallace then invited them to his house for a
home-cooked barbecue dinner; unbeknownst to
them, he had also invited his best friend, Reggie.
Text 3 is from the two-hour interview recorded on
that occasion (August 17, 1988). As this excerpt
about Hurricane Carla suggests, the interview consists primarily of conversation between Wallace and
Reggie of two friends talking to one another rather
than to the fieldworkers (CA, GB).
Text 3
R:
W:
R:

Yeah. I was jus gettin outta work here when it

was ol Carla.
Boy it was rough down here, it was rough.
Sure I mean.

W:
R:
W:
R:
CA:
R:

All cars.
You oughta seen Galveston.
All cars, all cars all off in the ditch.
You oughta seed Galveston.
There probably wasnt much of it huh.
That great big ol steel, them brick, stone
houses, rock houses, brick homes, an some of
them buildings out there with that steel in it
that wide. It jus double it up like that.
W: I went, I went up here to look at this here in
Waco that time R was heading up there . . . .
R: I bet you I went up there twice.
W: The man had said, Shoot ain no way in the
world. I said, Well what you think about
that? Man them railroads, rail, it jus bent
em double. An that rail, that bridge that go
across the river it tore it up.
R: That man told me in Waco I went up there
twice up there an them guys told me they
was sittin where, jus like this house sittin on
concrete blocks or cedar block, had long left
there. An he said they frigidaires was in the
air like paper.
W: Well I was sittin over there on the railroad. I was
workin on the railroad up there. I had a sister
over there. It blowed all her stuff away. An
then see they wouldn let us come in there,
over there, cause they had done got all them
soldiers from, from Killeen up there. They
wouldn let us come there. I couldn get no
further to the river. The further they let us go.
They wouldn let us go over there.
GB: That was in Waco. There was a big tornado up
there?
W: That was in Waco.
R: Yeah man. Went right down the street, an when
it got to the courthouse it just parted.
Addressing the Observers Paradox

Group interviews such as in Text 3 provide significant

amounts of speech between Springville residents, but
the interviewers nevertheless remain part of the interview context. The ultimate goal of sociolinguistic
fieldwork, however, is to diminish the role of
the interviewer and allow informants to interact
with each other, as they would normally do if
the fieldworker were not present. An important
component of Labovs model of stylistic variation
(i.e., the consequences of the amount of attention
paid to speech) was the creation of contexts within
the casual interview situation that would elicit
spontaneous speech, a style used in excited, emotionally charged conversations when informants would
be the least likely to pay attention to their speech
(Labov, 1972a). These contexts include remarks to

Researching Naturally Occurring Speech 561

Bells approach to style provides a scheme for understanding how the observers paradox works. As Table 1
shows, the concepts from audience design can be
adapted to estimate the effect that a fieldworker
might have on intraspeaker variation (or style
shifting). In individual interviews, the staple of sociolinguistic methodology, the fieldworker is the addressee; in addition, the fieldworker is often an
outsider to the community and frequently a member
of a different social class or ethnic group. In peer
group interviews the role of the fieldworker shifts
from addressee to auditor and the peers become the
addressees as group members primarily interact with
each other and not with the fieldworker. This is clearly
shown in Text 3 above.
Site Studies

Figure 1 Interlocutor roles (adapted from Bell A (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13, 145204
with permission of Cambridge University Press).

the interviewer outside of the formal interview itself;

speech to third parties who happen to intrude on the
interview; speech not in direct response to questions
(i.e., digressions); discussions of childhood games
and rhymes; and responses to danger of death
questions.
Labovs techniques for eliciting spontaneous speech
styles were a key advance in sociolinguistic field methods. Subsequent variation research, however, has suggested that not all of these strategies successfully
create contexts for the most casual speech. Milroy
(1987a), for example, suggests that fieldworkers
have no way of ensuring the intrusion of third parties
or even of systematically getting comments outside of
the formal interview context. Moreover, the use of
danger of death questions is often inappropriate
such was the case for her informants in Belfast.
An alternative conception of style defines stylistic
variation as a direct consequence of speakers linguistic accommodation to the people who are listening to
them of a shift toward the interlocutors speech. As
a result, stylistic or intraspeaker variation should be
analyzed in light of the speech of a speakers audience
since it is the speech of the audience that provides
both the impetus for variation in the first place and
also the target for accommodation. Bells audience
design theory produces a model that can be perceived
of as a series of concentric circles, as in Figure 1. The
further away in audience role interlocutors are, the
less effect they will have on intraspeaker variation
and thus on the degree of accommodation.

The third interview situation, site studies (see Text 4

below), provides a context where the fieldworker is a
participant-observer (cf. Geertz, 1973; Spradley,
1980) rather than a ratified participant (Bell, 1984,
2001) at community gathering places. Moreover, the
fieldworker becomes an overhearer to interactions
where peers are the primary addressees and auditors (see Table 1). Site studies represent a strategy
for ameliorating the observers paradox because
the focus of the fieldwork is not on the speech of
individual informants, but on the speech used at
strategic sites of linguistic interaction over a given
period of time (Cukor-Avila and Bailey, 1995).
Many of the recordings during the initial phase of
the Springville fieldwork in 19881989 were done
at the Springville Store, the main gathering place in
the village, where Cukor-Avila was hanging out on a
daily basis. Over time she became friends with people
from the community and gained their trust, and soon
the interviews became closely intertwined with the
day-to-day business of the store and began to include
a wide range of unsolicited linguistic interactions,
including teasing, arguments, jokes, business transactions, and the routine conversations that make up
much of Springvilles linguistic activity. Cukor-Avila
was able to record these conversations between community members because they arose naturally while
she was talking to people in the store.
Text 4, which is an excerpt from a site study
recorded at the Springville Store in August 1988,
provides examples of this type of interaction. These
texts also illustrate three main features of site studies:
(1) the rapid and natural ways that interlocutor roles
change, (2) the rapid and natural ways that topics
change without input from the fieldworker, and (3)
the occurrence of embedded and parallel conversations (shown in italics in the transcripts).

562 Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

Table 1 Typical audience structure of different types of fieldwork
Audience design

Addressee

Auditor

Overhearer

Eavesdropper

Individual interviews
Peer group interviews
Site studies
Community fieldworker

Fieldworker
Peers
Peers [fieldworker]
Interviewee/peers

Fieldworker
Peers [fieldworker]
Peers

Fieldworker/peers

[Fieldworker]

Text 4
R: Me an my girlfrien RB: YThats the same one
you an M. saw ain
walkin one night,
it?
walkin . . . [RB and
S overlap]
S: Yeah thats the one
they say an then
M. tol me he ain
tellin the truth.
Same way I tell him
firs. [SR walks
up],. Mr. Stan!
RB: Howdy Mr. Stan.
SR: Whats, whats goin
on, the riff?
S: The riff. Nothin but
the riff. Get a sodie
water. O.K., uh,
well be down here
all day I magine.
[laughs]
R: [continues his story] An uh, we were walkin
along there talkin. Then cross the railroad
track. All at once grabbed me a stick. Hey boy,
what you standin on me for? Don you see
that man you walkin into? She mean it. She
could see him.
S: But she seen him?
R: Uh huh.
S: Man. Wooo. Now I knew I was seein things
which I thought was a ghost. But when you
come to realize that it, it don be nothin but a
bush [L. overlaps]
L: That you see in the road.
S: . . . or, or somethin that, that, you know, that you
haven seen.

R: I know, I know some guy that be years ago

about six young guys, you talkin about young
men. Well they had a meetin that day in the
church at night. There was this crazy German
in the church. Along in them days you didn
have no uh, lightnin paper. You had to use
newspaper. People goin to church an theyd
throw the paper down side of the road an it
blowed up aroun in some piles that was about
that high. An them guys walkin to the church
that night an the winds blowin. An that
paper come an blowed up aroun that stuff.
They looked at [unintelligible]. Everyone of em
had a gun. They emptied that, them guns in that
paper an BOOM! [S laughs and overlaps R]
Newspaper blowed up aroun in piles an stuff
...
S: An thats all it was?
R: Uh huh.
S: You see that, thats what Im talkin about here.
A person eyes can fool you.
R: Oh yeah.
S: Oh, they can fool you.
R: But I ain gonna let
mine fool me.

R:
S:
R:
S:
R:

S:

A:

S: [to P.] Hey lover,

where you goin?
P: To wash my hands.
S: [to FW] You didn
know that she was a
lover did you?
[laughs]
My eyes ain never fooled me but one time. That
time I tell you I, that man come down on me.
Uh huh.
Well it didn fool me then. An Ive no doubt what
it was.
Well it, it was a real man?
No. It wasn nothin but a large snake standin up
in the fiel. M shot it for me walkin jus like it
was [S laughs/overlaps]
Hey. Well one night I did the same thing. I run
from a, a stump. It started off, started off about
this high. It was humped over like that. I run till
I jus run myself to death. An the nex day
I went back by there. I said, Im gonna see
what was that. An it was jus a ol tree they
had cut off high.
Tell the reason why you were runnin.

Researching Naturally Occurring Speech 563

S: Shit. Girl I was runnin. See I was doin somethin
I don have no business to know with. You
know that! [everyone laughs] Thought I had
got caught an I was runnin like the devil. An
the nex day I come back by there. I said, You
know a mand kill hisself for nothin wouldn
he. Cause if somein got in my way Id run
over it. An you know you can run a long ways
when youre scared. You can move an never
get tired.
A: Specially when you somewheres where you ain
sposed to be.
S: Yeah I was where I wasn sposed to be. [laughs]
I didn do it no more neither. I got scared. That
scared me good! I said, Ohh. I ain gonna tell
yall what I said but I sure was cussin boy. I said,
Hot dog got caught!

In Text 4, Cukor-Avila is an auditor and an overhearer; S directly addresses her in an aside. Moreover,
because Cukor-Avila is not an interviewer but a participant in a community activity, she does not control
the floor (i.e., does not determine who speaks), nor
does she control the topics. The natural, everyday
flow of linguistic interaction that typically takes
place at the store develops. There are also two embedded conversations within this excerpt. The first
one occurs when R attempts to begin his story but
pauses while RB and S have a short conversation in
which others at the store are not ratified participants.
The second one occurs when S flirts with P, who
passes by on her way to the bathroom. (Flirting and
teasing are common speech acts in the store; this
episode is typical).
While embedded conversations such as these are
typical of the everyday linguistic interaction at the
store, parallel conversations among different sets of
interlocutors are just as common. In these situations,
one group of interlocutors carries on a conversation independently of, and sometimes even unaware
of, another group that is carrying on a conversation. Oftentimes lulls in one groups conversation
allow members to overhear part of another groups
conversation and occasionally to make comments
across groups. Moreover, people occasionally move
back and forth between groups, there is fluid shifting
of topics and interlocutor roles, and unsolicited
narratives occur.

Conclusion
Site studies allow fieldworkers to become overhearers
rather than addressees, and they create contexts
in which speech outside of the interview situation
becomes the norm rather than the exception. In addition, site studies provide a unique cultural and

linguistic window on a community by allowing fieldworkers access to witness, participate in, and record
speech events typically absent from sociolinguistic
interviews. As Text 4 demonstrates, the focus on a
strategic site of linguistic interaction, rather than on
individuals or groups of people, makes it possible for
fieldworkers to record the natural linguistic interactions of community members with each other, rather
than with the fieldworkers.
While site studies certainly do not eliminate the
observers paradox, they can substantially ameliorate
it. Because the sites themselves are a natural part of
the community and the recordings made at the sites
are of natural speech, these recordings, coupled with
recordings from individual, peer group, and community fieldworkers (preferably over time), can provide
sociolinguists with a broad range of data for both
qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis.

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Respect Vocabulary in Austronesian

K Cook, Hawaii Pacific University, Honolulu, HI, USA
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In a number of Austronesian languages, speakers replace everyday vocabulary with a special set of words
in order to show respect for addressees and/or referents. This phenomenon fits under the broader rubric
of honorifics; the term honorifics, however, includes
not only the use of respect vocabulary, but also morphosyntactic adjustments to speech, including special
pronouns, affixes, and verb forms (see Honorifics).
Furthermore, the term is traditionally used in
descriptions of non-Austronesian languages of East
and South Asia, e.g., Japanese, Korean, Tibetan,
and Thai. A well-known (and well-studied) exception, however, is Javanese, an Austronesian language
spoken in Indonesia that has an elaborate honorific
system (Errington, 1988; Geertz, 1960; Uhlenbeck,
1970). Vocabulary substitution is part of the Javanese
honorific system; for example, the everyday word for
rice sega, is replaced by the word sekul in the more
formal speech styles. Similarly, the respect word
tindak go out replaces the non-honorific verbs

mangkat, ke sah, and lunga, which also mean go out

(Errington, 1988).
Within the Austronesian family, respect vocabulary
has been reported in Polynesia (Samoan, Tonga, East
Futuna, Wallisian, and previously Hawaiian, Tahitian, and, with a reduced lexicon, Niue), Micronesia
(Namoluk, Ponapean (Pohnpeian), and formerly
Kusaie (Kosraean), Marshallese, and Palauan), Indonesia (Alune, Bali, Javanese, Madura, Nuaulu (North
and South), Sangihe (Sangir), Sasak, Sunda, and
Tetun Terik (Eastern Tetun)), the Loyalty Islands
(Dehu and Nengone), Fiji and Rotuma, and Madagascar (the southern dialects of Malagasy) (Blixon,
1969; Florey and Bolton, 1997; Fox, 2005; Grimes
and Maryott, 1994; Nothofer, 2000; van Klinken,
1999; and Verguin, 1957).
Samoan serves as an example of how respect
vocabulary is employed in a Polynesian language. In
Samoan, about 450 respect words (called upu faaaloalo) are substituted for everyday terms when the
speaker addresses or refers to chiefs or orators
(Milner, 1961). For instance, the ordinary word fale
house is replaced by maota when referring to the
house of a chief, whereas it is substituted with laoa