Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery

Technical Note on Transcription and Research Methods

Technical Note on Transcription and Research Methods For students and scholars of literary Tibetan, I use orthographic transcription, specifically, the widely used romanized Wylie (1959) transliteration system. The variety of spoken Tibetan in this corpus is largely so-called Standard Spoken Tibetan (Tournadre and Rdo-rje 2003), a variety based on Central Tibetan in the Lhasa area. Of the many facets of spoken Tibetan not accurately represented by the standard orthography, the quotative clitic -s stands out as a special concern, since it figures into my analysis, especially in chapter 2 on debate. Some (e.g., Denwood 1999:118) suggest that the verb whose orthographic form is zer (‘say’; /ser/) occurs in a reduced form, either as /sa/ (often with lengthening /sa:/) or as /-s/. /sa/ and /ser/ differ distributionally from -s, however. The latter can be framed by matrix clause verba dicendi (e.g., zer [ser] and lab [/l
p/]): The clitic /-s/ thus differs from zer (/ser/) and its reduced form (/sa/) on phonemic and morphosyntactic grounds. For this and other reasons, I use a combination of orthographicand phonemictranscription, especiallyfor debatediscourseinchapter 2 and reprimand discourse in chapter 4. In both chapters the following multitier transcription layout is used: Line 1 orthographic transcription (in italics) parallel free translation Line 2 phonemic transcription Line 3 item-by-item gloss xiv Line 1 is also used for indicating speech overlap, latching (lack of perceivable pause across a turn boundary), dysfluencies such as false-starts, and other details relevant to the analysis of discursive interaction (for theoretical and methodological reflections on transcription, see, for example, Ochs 1979; Edwards and Lampert 1993; Duranti 1997:137–54). For vocalizations such as filled pauses and backchannel cues, rough orthographic approximations are given, such as a for [
:] and ‘m for [ʔmʔ]. In the debate transcripts in chapter 2, line breaks mark intonation unit boundaries, a unitization of discourse that is important for the study of interaction and for the analysis of phenomena like speech articulation rate. For phonemic transcription in line 2, I have elected to use the simplified conventions found in Melvyn Goldstein’s latest Tibetan-English dictionary (Goldstein, Shelling, and Surkhang 2001), in which tips on pronunciation can also be found. Forsimplicity,Idonotrepresenttheeffectsofphonologicalprocesseslikevowelharmony ,andwhilethetranscriptionconventionsfromthislatestdictionaryarearguably not as helpful for linguists as those of the International Phonetics Alphabet or the Americanist conventions used in some of Goldstein’s earlier dictionaries and in the classic work on Lhasa Tibetan phonology by Kun Chang and Betty Shefts Chang (1964, 1967), the improved accessibility seemed a worthwhile trade-off. When I am not analyzing face-to-face interaction, I use orthographic transcription with free English translation, and when I mention Tibetan terms in the body of the text, I typically provide the orthographic form in italics after the English glosses. For proper names and for frequently used Tibetan terms, English approximations of Tibetan pronunciation are used (e.g., “Geluk” for dge lugs). The first time such names and terms are introduced, they are followed by their orthographic equivalent in parentheses or an endnote. TRANSCRIPTION ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS abl ablative acc accusative agen agentive asr assertoric mood aux auxiliary verb cond conditional csq confirmation-seeking question dat dative det determiner dir directive dubit dubitative mood erg ergative fct factive Note on Transcription and Research Methods xv gen genitive hon honorific hon.a addressee-focal honorific iev imperfective evidential imp imperative inj injunctive mood ins instrumental int interrogative mood loc locative neg negation marker nh non-honorific nom nomic evidential np noun phrase nzr nominalizer opt optative p participant-indexing (auxiliary verb) ~p participant non-specific (auxiliary verb) pev perfective evidential pl plural pn proper name prc precative prp participant role perspective qt quotative clitic top topicalizer vlq volunteering question whq WH question ynq yes/no question { . . . / . . . } paradigmatic contrast [ ] author’s interpolations : lengthening [line break] intonational unit boundary (debate transcripts only) / vertical line termed shad in Tibetan, which typically marks clause and sentence boundaries ‘’ latching (lack of perceivable pause between utterances; less than 1/10 of second) STATEMENT OF METHODS By necessity this work operates at the intersection of disciplines. I am indebted to and engage literature in Tibetan and Buddhist studies, but the book’s home is anthropology , especially the subfield of linguistic anthropology. The chapters that folxvi Note on Transcription and Research Methods low may be considered, more specifically, essays in—perhaps, toward—an anthropology of interaction. Why privilege face-to-face interaction? There is ample empirical...