A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction : GAT 2

Abstract

This article presents a revised version of GAT, a transcription system first deve l- oped by a group of German conversation analysts and interactional linguists in 1998. GAT tries to follow as many principles and conventions as possible of the Jefferson -style transcription used in Conversation Analysis, yet proposes some conventions which are more compatible with linguistic and phonetic analyses of spoken language , especially for the representation of prosody in talk -in-interac - tion. After ten years of use by researchers in conversation and discourse analysis, the original GAT has been revised, against the background of past exper ience and in light of new neces sities for the transcription of corpora arising from technologi - cal advances and methodological developments over recent years. The present text makes GAT accessible for the English -speaking community. It presents the GAT 2 transcription system with all its co nventions and gives detailed instruc - tions on how to transcribe spoken interaction at three levels of de licacy: minimal, basic and fine . In addition, it briefly introduces some tools that may be helpful for the user: the German online tutorial GAT -TO and t he tran scription editing software FOLKER.