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A Negotiation Dialogue in a "Hostage" Situation This page gives access to the DMT analysis of one dialogue, described below. Click on items to view the analysis.
Situation: This interaction occured on March 8, 1993, early in the Waco, Texas confrontation between the FBI (and other agencies) and the Branch Dravidian religious group leader David Koresh. In previous negotiation the government had offered to give milk, for the trapped children, in exchange for releases of children. A government spokesman comes to the compound to interact.
Participants: Sheriff Harwell, representing government forces, and David Koresh, representing the residents.
Acknowledgment: This dialogue was found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/waco/milknegotiation.html by browsing the Internet. It is accompanied by a large amount of background and discussion material. There are also "tapes" of intervals of material apparently recorded secretly.
Features: This dialogue is distinctive and extreme in many ways. It appears to have a high level of overlapped speech, and a large proportion of the time spent struggling for control of the interaction. According to the DMT analysis, out of 31 turns, only about 11 were engaged in collaborative interaction. It is in very strong contrast to the Apollo 13 dialogues on this website.
It is also clearly resumptive -- Koresh attempts to directly resume an argument from a previous dialogue.
It has an interesting degree of collaborative success, given the communication styles and adversarial positions of the participants. There are complications because both participants represent organizations in some parts of the interaction and themselves as individuals in other parts.
The ability of these persons to interact does not represent a stable genre which they share.
Symbol PDF file Transcript, Symbolic and Graphic Analysis in
Spreadsheet for viewing and downloadMilk02 Click for pdf. Click for spreadsheet. Note that your browser can (probably) either view (by Click) or download each of these forms, possibly from the File menu.