The “Retrospective Commenting” Method for Longitudinal Recordings of Everyday Speech

The paper describes a pilot experiment aimed at revealing the occurrences of miscommunication between interlocutors in everyday speech recordings. Here, miscommunication is understood as situations in which the recipient perceives the meaning of the message in a different way from what was intended by the speaker. The experiment was based on the methodology of longitudinal recordings taken during one day, following the approach which is used for gathering audio data for the ORD speech corpus. But in addition it was enhanced by audition of the whole recording afterwards by the respondent himself/herself and his/her simultaneous commenting on some points of communicative settings with unobservable features. The task of the respondent was to note all occurrences of miscommunication, to explain to the researcher all unclear moments of interaction, to help in interpreting the emotional state of interlocutors, and to give some hints on pragmatic purposes, revealing those aspects of spoken interaction that are usually hidden behind the evident facts. The results of the experiment showed that miscommunication is indeed a rather frequent phenomenon in everyday face-to-face interaction. Moreover, the retrospective commenting method could significantly broaden the opportunities of discourse and pragmatic research based on long-term recordings.