Dialogue OC8 of the Operator's Console Corpus

This page gives access to the DMT analysis of one of the dialogues of the Operator's Console Corpus. These dialogues have a rare combination of attributes that make them extremely suitable as research data. Click on items to view the analysis.

Situation: These dialogues occured in a self-recording medium, a computer operator's printing control console. Read details of how they were collected in OC Corpus .

Participants: The participants in every case were a computer Operator and a computer network user, interacting, often very naively, during the early days of what was later called the Internet. The Operator could see the user's name at the beginning of the dialogue, but very frew of the users were personally known to the Operators. The user saw only the identifier Operator.

Features of this dialogue: Several aspects of this dialogue are somewhat infrequent. It shows how requested actions are handled when the requests are decisively refused. The Operator (in a servant role) and the user remain collaborative at the speech level (and polite, patient, cooperative and congenial) despite the conflict in terms of actions. DMT tries to distinguish between refusals to do, as in this case, and refusals to talk about something.

It also shows how suggestions are sometimes used to divert blame, mitigate the offense and perhaps in this case even advance the user's goals.

Symbol	PDF file	Transcript, Symbolic and Graphic Analysis in Spreadsheet for download and manipulation
OC8	Click for pdf.	Click for spreadsheet.

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