Girl Interrupted

I’m working on a paper for a Sociolinguistics class. I have chosen as my topic to analyze the interruptive strategies used in business meetings. This has been fascinating and challenging for me. It seems that most of the work done in this area focuses on conversations between two or maybe three people, and much of it uses conversations nurtured in an experimental setting.

I’ve gone Mutual of Omaha, and sought out the interruption in its native habitat. I was allowed to record the weekly status meeting of a small design firm. The firm has seven partners and three employees, all of whom were present for the meeting. I had a hell of time transcribing this, as people were interrupting each other constantly. It was a great big mass of overlaps, back channeling, and side conversations. In spite of this difficulty, I have found the meeting to be a tremendously valuable source for this kind of research.

As Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra J. Harris point out in their 1996 article for Text, entitled “Interruptive Strategies in British and Italian Management Meetings,” meetings are a great place to gather data because unlike normal conversations, meetings often provide a large corpus of contextually related data. Instead of recording and transcribing a forty second exchange, you get an hour or more. This allows you to view interruptive behavior in a broad context, making it much easier to determine what an interruption is, and the overall impact that a given interruption might have on the conversation.

The Bargiela-Chiappini/Harris article is also interesting in that it notes the task oriented nature of business meetings. Business meetings usually (though not always) have a point. They usually consist of a few people getting together to accomplish something. It may be a single specific task (as is the case with the Bargiela-Chiappini/Harris data) or it may be multiple tasks addressed in brief (like my data). Either way, even if people disagree with one another they are still working toward the same ultimate goal. Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris found that in their case, interruption contributed to the function of the meetings, and ultimately to the accomplishment of the tasks at hand.

I am finding in my own data that most of the overlaps in speech are supportive or facilitative in nature, and those overlaps which go beyond back channel agreement almost always serve to propel the meeting forward. I have quite a ways to go in my data analysis, but I feel like I’m on a good track.

As I was watching Condoleeza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission a few days ago, I was surprised to find myself thinking about my project. A few things about the testimony jumped out at me right away. Giving testimony before this commission is similar in many ways to a business meeting: there are several participants, it is clearly task oriented, it’s in a formal setting, etc.

On the other hand there are some key differences. Although there are several participants, the hearing, by convention, is broken down into a series of 10 minute dyadic conversations. This time limit is strictly enforced, and is referenced directly by multiple interlocutors when they feel that Rice is wasting their time (violating Grice’s maxim of quantity). Kerrey goes so far as to accuse Rice of filibustering him. All of the participants are trying to take advantage of the format of the proceedings, but in different ways depending on which side of the desk they’re on.

Another important difference between this hearing and a business meeting is that not all of the participants appear to be working toward the same goal. Interruption in this case appears to serve the interrupter’s agenda, but not necessarily to move the meeting forward, or contribute to the smooth functioning of the commission.

A careful analysis of the transcript of these proceedings would be an interesting project in discourse strategy. It is a rich source of data both in the area of interruption and in the selective violation of Grice’s Maxims. Both of these are used deliberately and frequently to accomplish the speakers’ goals.