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In this book, 264 pages are devoted to a detailed study of what happens in the first five minutes of one initial interview—and it is not long enough. It is the first detailed report of a serious application of linguistics and communication theory to study of the interview. The authors are feeling their way and, at this stage, refuse to be dominated by the current fashions of the hypothetico-deductive method and the study of large samples.
The first step in the investigation was a linguistic transcription of a readily available, acoustic recording of the opening of an interview, by an experienced psychiatrist. This transcription used symbols denoting all the audible items omitted in spelling. It included not only the contrastive units of language (phonemes), but also all the paralinguistic phenomena such as intonation, drawling or clipping, breaks and pauses, hems and haws, sighs, gasps, coughs, as well as such variables as rate of speech, register, volume, and tone quality. This transcription was made by a trained linguistic anthropologist who listened carefully and repeatedly for 25 to 30 hours. He was then joined by the two other authors and other psychiatrists who met frequently to listen to the recording and to discuss what was going on in, and between, the patient and the interviewer. An attempt was made to relate the psychiatrists’ detection of psychological states to the linguistic expert's specification of audible signals, and the terminology for psychological gestalts to the linguistic names for observed items. At some times, such remarks as “she sounds anxious there” led to a search for signals in the transcription that might account for the intuition. At other times, the problem would be to understand the psychological meaning of particular features in the record. An attempt was made to determine the developmental structure of the interview by detecting “boundary-markers”, i.e. signals which intimated ends and beginnings of particular phases.
By careful att