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4  Activity‐based corpus analysis and design of Phrases 1

4.3  Data

4.3.1 Shop conversations in GSLC 

The activity Shop in GSLC contains four different types of recorded sub-activities.

Table 4.3. The sub activities in the activity Shop in GSLC (The Corpus overview, as of March 2006)  

Shop 

 Activity  Recordings  Speakers*  Sections Tokens Duration**

Food  25.2 49 2 505 1:42:34?

Games  43  3.7 93 28 262 4:49:08?

Radio/TV  14.5 47 15 722 3:29:29

Supermarket  5.0 5 4 006 0:31:19

Total  All of Shop  54  6.9 194 50 497 10:32:31?

*Values in the speakers’ column are average instead of total  

**Durations marked with '?' are partly estimated according to number of tokens    

‘Food’ contains recordings at the checkout counter of a supermarket. The interactions are often short and the customers come one after the other in rapid succession. The

customers are of varying ages and genders. ‘Games’ was recorded in a shop where you can buy and sell board games, card games and computer games. The recording is from around 1995 and both the sales clerks and most of their customers are quite young and predominately male. ‘Radio/TV’ contains recordings of customers coming in to leave or collect electronic devices for repair. ‘Supermarket’ is one long recording of a mother and

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her son, visiting different sales point sections at a supermarket. The ‘Shop’ conversations were recorded by audio only. 

4.3.2 Some characteristics of the shop activities 

The games shop 

In the games shop different kinds of games are sold (and bought): card games, games for role-play, computer games and different artefacts that can be used while playing the games. Customers can also trade with cards. There are several shop assistants working in the shop, presumably quite young people, most of them young men. There are a couple of sales assistants in the shop at the same time, and they are talking a lot to each other.

When there are no customers in the shop they talk about many different topics – many of these conversations could just as well have been included in the transcriptions of Informal Conversations. There is a lot of noise from the street, telephones ringing and noise from the till that contribute to the fact that many words have been hard to transcribe and that there are several segments that have been coded as unintelligible.

Some of the conversations are telephone conversations where you can hear only what the shop assistant says, not the customer. The items that are sold in the shop often have English names, and a lot of English words and utterances are used by both the customers and the shop assistants.

The radio & TV repair shop 

The radio & TV repair shop have many similarities with the games shop. There are a couple of shop assistants behind a counter who are serving customers that come to the shop, as well as taking a lot of telephone calls. There is a lot of technical talk in the radio

& TV repair shop, since it is technical problems that bring the customers to the shop.

The radio & TV repair shop seems to be a busier place than the games shop; there are less room for conversations among the shop assistants about other things than the activities that take place in the shop.

The food shop 

The food shop is different from the other two shops. It is a grocery where the customers assemble the things they are buying on their own, taking them to the checkout where they meet the cashier. The conversations that are recorded take place mainly at the checkout point. The customers talk to each other and to the cashier. There are a lot of customers and the conversations are usually very short.

Supermarket 

In the transcription called Supermarket we can follow a mother and her son through a supermarket, from the store to their car and on to a fish shop where they buy some fish for dinner. They buy some items over the counter, but most of the time they talk about a variety of subjects with one another as they cruise through the supermarket.

76  Table 4.4. Activity coding for shop activity in general 

  PURPOSE 

 

Buying/ 

selling   goods 

Activity structure Sub‐goals Procedures 

1. Customer comes to shop,  chooses among the items.  

2. Customer may ask for  information from a  salesperson. 

3. The goods the customer  wants to buy are brought to  the counter/cash register. 

4. Customer pays for the  objects and gets a receipt  from the shop 

assistant/cashier. 

5. Customer leaves the shop  with the objects he/she  bought. 

Provide customer  with the requested  goods and/or  information. 

Exchange goods for  money. 

Make the customer  satisfied and  wanting to come  back. 

The goods are displayed on  shelves. In some shops the  customers pick the items from the  shelves and put them in a trolley  or cart, then bring them to the  counter. In other shops they have  to ask the shop assistants for help. 

Combinations of these procedures  exist in most shops. The 

customers pay the shop assistants  for the things they want to keep. 

They leave the shop with the  objects. 

          ROLES 

 

 

  Competence Rights Obligation

Customer Knowledge about  shopping routines.  

Knowledge of how to  shop in the actual type  of shop. 

Buy the items sold in  the shop. Receive  information from the  salespersons about  the goods. 

Pay for the goods he/she  takes out of the shop. 

Certain degree of politeness.

Salesperson  (Shop  assistant or  cashier) 

Knowledge about the  items sold in the shop  and how to sell them. 

Receive payment for  what the customer  buys. 

High degree of politeness  and honesty. Be of service  to the customer and loyal to  the owner.  

ARTE‐

FACTS 

Instruments Media 

Objects to be sold. Cash register, coupons, money,  credit cards, ID‐cards, scale, bar code reader, trolley. 

Direct speech. Shopping lists. 

Telephone. 

ENVIRON‐

MENT 

Social–Cultural Physical 

May not know each other, but some  customers and salespersons do. 

Building in which the goods are displayed on shelves  and on or behind counters. A place in the shop  where you pay for the goods. 

4.3.3 Transcriptions and their modification for the analyses 

The recordings in GSLC are transcribed with Modified Standard Orthography (MSO), also called GTS (Gothenburg Transcription Standard) (Allwood 2001b; Allwood et al., 2003). (See Appendix C)

Every transcription starts with a ‘header’ that contains mandatory information about the activity type, the participants in the conversation(s) (anonymous), who the transcriber is, etc. The participants are identified through their roles in the conversations, such as ‘shop assistant’ or ‘customer’ in the shop conversations. Each participant is assigned a unique letter in the transcription, in what seems like running order.

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For the analyses, it was important to be able to separate the customers’ expressions from the shop assistants’ and from other

peoples’ in the shops. To accomplish that, new labels were assigned to all participants, in order to make it possible to identify them as customers (C), shop assistants (S) or other (O). It was also specified whether they were male (M), female (F), of unknown (U) gender or children (C). If there were more than one of each kind in a transcription, they were assigned a number. In this way a male customer could be labelled CM2

(customer, male), a female shop assistant SF1 and a child accompanying a parent OC1.

The activity Games (shop) consists of 43 transcribed recordings, and a computerized tool called Leonardo (Gunnarsson, 2006) has been used to sort the utterances in the

transcription into different groups. The purpose of using Leonardo was to be able to code the transcriptions and create reports of the groups, and at the same time be able to see the expressions in their context within the transcription.

All the transcriptions from the games shop were transferred into one document. The transcriptions were also pruned to include only conversations between customers and shop assistants that had to do with the specific activity of shopping – to buy, sell, order or enquire about the goods that were sold in the shop. The original transcriptions also include other types of conversations. The document with the pruned conversations from the games shop came to consist of 60 pages with 3598 lines and 25,886 words. All comments were included in these numbers, so not all 25,886 words were spoken by the participants in the conversations.