Think back to the 80s, to the time when the ‘answerphone’ was still only halfway to becoming the ‘ansaphone’. Would you say that the language that callers used in their messages was spoken or written? At a recent workshop a participant told us that when she heard the answerphone voice she rang off, wrote her message on a piece of paper, re-dialled and read out what she had in front of her! Her message was oral in medium but written in terms of its thought process and probably its grammar. As this shows, it is not always easy to know whether a stretch of language is oral or written.
What are the general characteristics of these two manifestations of human language?
| Spoken | Written |
| immensely ancient | comparatively recent |
| the primary form of language | the secondary form |
| universal among humans | an attribute of wealth |
| acquired/invented by age 5 | learned by puberty, if at all |
| quantitatively the major form | quantitatively the minor form |
| carries people‘s interactive emotional life | in the First World carries knowledge and information |
| carries internal monologue and dialogue | is often public |
| dominated by women/ mothers | is frequently in the male domain |
| has low prestige in the First World | has high prestige in the First World |
| dies without trace | dies but leaves traces |
| modifies rapidly | modifies more slowly |
| grammar codification just beginning (in English) | grammar encoded in various systems |
| paralinguistic features include pitch, volume, resonance, speed and bodily gesture | paralinguistic features reduced to punctuation, handwriting or typeface |
| largely spontaneous | largely pre-meditated |
| opportunity for repair and paraphrase | no immediate opportunity to monitor reader feedback and effect repair |
Before reading on, please think of all the other distinctions between the two forms that I have failed to mention.
The grammar of spoken English
The grammar we teach from coursebooks is often a simplification (at worst a perversion of the grammar) of written English. It is paradoxical that we should be working from a version of written grammar and yet have our students’ oral competence as our main conscious aim. A common enough spoken (or written!) sentence such as ‘She told me she’ll be here tonight‘ is considered to be ’wrong‘ because it mixes the three conditionals for which we have been given strict rules. Research at Nottingham University (by Carter and McCarthy) shows clearly that the English of conversation has a grammar very different from that of the written language. Here is an example:
In the written language, if reporting takes place in the past the reporting verb will be in the Past Simple: She told me that...
In spoken conversational genre, as opposed to spoken narrative genre, the reporting verb will typically be in the Past Continuous: She was telling me that...
This form implies that I have a relationship with the speaker. One of the most important discoveries by Carter and McCarthy is that you cannot describe the grammar of spoken English without constant reference to the relationship between speakers. In their growing description of the oral language, speaker relationship has a major value as a grammatical variable. This is unlikely to be found in a coursebook.
The grammar of written English
The Collins Cobuild project has provided us with a description of written English from large amounts of data that now allows me to teach my students things that I would never have thought of teaching them fifteen years ago. Let me give an example:
Fifteen years ago I would have taught them verbs like to kick and to kiss, but I would have omitted to show them the marvellous flexibility of English in sentences like:
She gave him a tender kiss
She gave him a vicious kick
The Cobuild Grammar calls give a ’delexical‘ verb; it simply gives verb force to the nouns kiss and kick. Thanks to corpus linguistics we can now teach the grammar of the written language more fully and concentrate on the most commonly-used language because the statistics tell us how prevalent structures are.
The cline between speaking and writing
Maybe the best way to deal with these two manifestations of language is to think of very different text-types as lying along the cline from very spoken to very written.
Where on the continuum would you place the following:
Mother’s baby talk - a legal report in a newspaper - a chat show on TV or radio - a personal letter - a World Wide Web message
Do you find the same difficulty with languages you know, or is the fuzziness surrounding these choices peculiar to English? If you have thoughts on this please write and share your views.
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