ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses sound and film records of parts of seven two-person conversations, involving thirteen individuals in all, three of whom were female, and all of whom were undergraduates at the University of Oxford. The films were transcribed, frame by frame, by means of a positional notation using pictographic symbols. With this notation not only was direction of gaze recorded for each frame but also details of the facial expression, the position of the head, the hands and arms, and the trunk. Analyses of these other aspects of the social performance will be reported. The words uttered, if any, within the half-second interval elapsing between each frame and the one following, were written in against each frame transcription. As Goldman-Eisler has shown, the actual rate of articulation remains remarkably constant, and highly characteristic for a given individual, there are large variations in overall speech rate and these are a function of the amount of hesitation that occurs in the utterance.
