ABSTRACT
Consider the following text (Text 1), an excerpt from a conversation between two sisters1, transcribed using conventional orthographic resources but without punctuation:
speaker one: hows your new oven speaker two: its fi ne its fi ne speaker one: youre not in love with it
There is something unusual about this text. The fi rst speaker asks a question of speaker two about her new oven to which the second speaker appears to respond with a positive appraisal, ‘its fi ne its fi ne’. Yet, the fi rst speaker’s response to this answer suggests that speaker two’s answer was not in fact positive but construed a negative or perhaps qualifi ed appraisal of the oven’s value. There was clearly something in speaker two’s reply not represented in the transcribed text above that speaker one has picked up on. It could have been a look, gesture or something in the ‘tone of voice’: one cannot say from the information available to us in the transcription2.
