English in Speech and Writing: Investigating Language and Literature (Interface (London, England).)

English in Speech and Writing In this activity-based textbook, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differ...

Author: Rebecca Hughes

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English in Speech and Writing

In this activity-based textbook, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differences between spoken and written English. Instead of presenting the student reader with a bewildering array of ‘facts’ about these two modes of communication, this book asks students to investigate the differences for themselves. English in Speech and Writing: • Provides an indispensable guide to the basic methods of analysis. • Promotes an awareness of the differences between spoken and written language. • Enables the student to distinguish between standard and non-standard forms of English. • Uses examples such as boxing commentaries, detective novels and film scripts, and compares actual speech patterns with literary ones. • Includes end-of-chapter activities and suggestions for further reading and follow-up study, as well as a comprehensive glossary of terms. Having worked through this book, students will have considered a wide range of spoken and written varieties and will be able to formulate their own opinions as to the differences present. English in Speech and Writing will be an essential text for students of language, linguistics and communication studies, as well as nonnative speakers of English and their teachers. Rebecca Hughes is Deputy Director of the Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham.

The INTERFACE Series A linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent tolinguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods, are equally flagrantanachronisms.—Roman Jakobson This statement, made over twenty-five years ago, is no less relevant today, and ‘flagrant anachronisms’ still abound. The aim of the INTERFACE series is to examine topics at the ‘interface’ of language studies and literary criticism and in doing so to build bridges between these traditionally divided disciplines. Already published in the series: THE DISCOURSE OF ADVERTISING Guy Cook LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CRITICAL PRACTICE Ways of analysing text David Birch LITERATURE, LANGUAGE AND CHANGE Ruth Waterhouse and John Stephens LITERARY STUDIES IN ACTION Alan Durant and Nigel Fabb LANGUAGE IN POPULAR FICTION Walter Nash LANGUAGE, TEXT AND CONTEXT Essays in stylisticsEdited by Michael J.Toolan THE LANGUAGE OF JOKES Analysing verbal playDelia Chiaro LANGUAGE, IDEOLOGY AND POINT OF VIEW Paul Simpson A LINGUISTIC HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY Richard Bradford LITERATURE ABOUT LANGUAGE Valerie Shepherd TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY From text to context Edited by Peter Verdonk TEXTUAL INTERVENTION

iii

Critical and creative strategies for literary studies Rob Pope FEMINIST STYLISTICS Sara Mills TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION From text to context Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber VARIETY IN WRITTEN ENGLISH Texts in society: societies in text Tony Bex The Series Editor Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham and was National Coordinator of the ‘Language in the National Curriculum’ Project (LINC) from 1989 to 1992.

English in Speech and Writing Investigating language and literature

Rebecca Hughes

London and New York

First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 28 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1996 Rebecca Hughes The author has asserted her moral rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data English in speech and writing: investigating language and literature / Rebecca Hughes. p. cm.—(Interface) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. I. English language—Discourse analysis. 2. English language— Spoken English. 3. English language—Written English. 4. English language—Syntax. 5. English language—Variation. I. Title. II. Series: Interface (London, England) PE1422.H84 1996 420′. 141-dc20 96–4246 ISBN 0-203-97812-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-12480-8 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-12481-6 (pbk)

To my late father, John Cledwyn Hughes

Contents

1

2

3

List of figures

ix

List of tables

x

Preface

xi

Acknowledgements

xii

List of abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

Intended readership

1

Outline of the book

2

Notation

3

Properties of speech and writing

4

Introduction

4

Analysis of sample discourse from speech and writing

14

Discussion and conclusion

30

Exercises

32

Further reading

34

Interactions on the page

35

Introduction

35

Actual versus literary interactions

36

A case-study: parliamentary interactions

52


60

Exercises

61

Further reading

62

Individuals in speech and writing

63

Introduction

63

viii

4

5

Real versus fictional individuals speaking

75

A case-study: parliamentary speakers in transcription

86


91

Exercises

93

Further reading

93

Analysing speech and writing in context

94

Introduction

94

Analysis of paired texts

99


91

Exercises

121

Further reading

122

Issues in the study of speech and writing

124

Introduction

124

Theoretical approaches

124

Empirical approaches

141

Appendix: approaching language analysis: a brief beginners’ guide and glossary

146

Introduction

146

Glossary

146

Paths to further study

162

Notes

165

References

170

Index

174

Figures

3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Development of mode awareness Nouns in lexical set associated with boxing Verbs in lexical set associated with boxing Verbs from commentaries (not in boxing set) Distribution of reference to fighters in spoken and written commentaries 4.5 The Consul’s nouns 4.6 Quincey’s nouns 4.7 The Consul’s verbs 4.8 Quincey’s verbs A.l Approaches to language study A.2 Example of phrase embedding

73 104 105 107 107 117 117 118 118 147 158

Tables

1.1 Breakdown of discourse contributions for three speakers in Sample 1 (casual conversation) 1.2 Grammatical features of Sample 1 (casual conversation) 1.3 Analysis of clause structure for Sample 1 (casual conversation) 1.4 Clause structure of Sample 2 (radio broadcast) 1.5 Sample analysis of noun phrase structure for Sample 2 (radio broadcast) 1.6 Clause analysis of Sample 3 (academic text) 2.1 Elimination of discourse categories in transcription 2.2 Discourse categories ranked by token totals 2.3 Token fall between Text Sl and Text W by discourse category ranked according to difference as percentage of Text Sl 2.4 Discourse categories ranked according to percentage of differences between Text S and Text W accounted for by speaker error 3.1 Divisions of idiolect 3.2 Clause analysis of Sample 18 (blackberry narrative) 3.3 Clause analysis of Sample 19 (accident narrative) 3.4 Clause analysis of Lord Emsworth’s speech 3.5 Clause analysis of McAllister’s speech 3.6 Number and percentage difference Text W from Text S for twenty speakers (ranked according to difference) 3.7 Clause structure of a low-token-loss speaker 4.1 Action versus evaluation in spoken commentary 4.2 Action versus evaluation in written commentary 4.3 Sample clause analysis of spoken commentary 4.4 Sample clause analysis of written commentary

18 21 22 24 24 28 56 57 59 59 64 77 77 82 83 87 90 101 102 108 108

Preface

I came to the study of language through studying literature and found that the new way of looking at language that linguistics entailed provided both a challenge and a novel perspective. I was frequently wrong-footed by the different assumptions in the latter sphere, and in particular found the reductive tendency in much of linguistics—for example the notion that within or beneath (depending on the school of thought) a sentence there was a more basic sentence with which it held identity—was hard for the student of literature in me to swallow. In time, I came to see that a fairly consistent tool for comparing texts was not without its benefits, either in the study of language or of literature. This book is partially a result of this journey of transition which I have made from one field of study into another. I hope that I have retained enough of a sense of my early bewilderment in language study to have provided a text which I could have understood as a beginner in the subject. Additionally, I hope that the issues raised are of sufficient interest for the more advanced reader to wish to continue to study in the often intangible and shifting interstices between speech and writing, in literary and nonliterary contexts.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to many people who have assisted me both on the road from literature to linguistics, and more specifically with the production of this book. In particular I would like to thank Ron Carter for his support and advice throughout, and more generally for his faith in me; Suzanne Romaine and David Cram for their constant support and advice during the preparation of the casestudy material; Margaret Berry, who taught me how to explain grammar; my husband, Kieron O’Hara, for patience and organisational skills beyond the call of duty. Finally, but by no means last in my thoughts, warm thanks to my colleagues at the Centre for English Language Education, and Department of English Studies, Nottingham University, whose teaching and administrative loads were increased during the preparation of this book. I would also like to express my thanks to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to use data from the corpus of spoken English, and to the Editor and staff of the Official Report, House of Commons, for their invaluable help with the sections devoted to parliamentary language. The author and publishers would like to thank A.P.Watt Ltd on behalf of the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate for permission to reprint extracts from ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girlfriend’, taken from Blandings Castle and Elsewhere by P.G.Wodehouse. Extracts from George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying are reprinted by permission of Copyright © The estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd. While the publishers have made every effort to contact copyright holders of material used in this volume, they would be grateful to hear from any they were unable to contact.

Abbreviations

Passages used for exemplification are given with the following abbreviations. BC

CUP/ Nottingham corpus KAF LEG

MC MSFS OR TF TQ UV WFM

Conan Doyle, A. (1981) 'The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet', in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Corpus of spoken English prepared by Nottingham University (Department of English Studies) in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. Orwell, George (1962) Keep the Aspidistra Flying, London: Penguin. (First published 1953.) Wodehouse, P. G. (1990) 'Lord Emsworth and the Girlfriend', in Muir, Frank (ed.) The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, London: Guild Publishing. Dickens, C. (1867) Martin Chuzzlewit (revised edn), London: Hazell, Watson and Viney. Høeg, Peter (1994) Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, London: Flamingo. The Official Report ('Hansard') debate on Televising the Commons, 8 February 1988. Mailer, Norman (1975) The Fight, London: Penguin. Bush, C. (1953) The Case of the Tudor Queen, London: Penguin. Lowry, Malcolm (1977) Under the Volcano, London: Penguin. (First published 1947.) Wright, Crispin (1980) Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics, London: Duckworth.

Introduction

INTENDED READERSHIP This book aims to give students an outline of the major issues and points of contrast between speech and writing, as well as an introduction to a means of comparison which they can carry further themselves. For the professional scholar there is interest in the form of the underlying argument that the relationship between speech and writing is more problematic than is sometimes thought, and also in both the presentation and the results of the extended application of channel-based comparison to a variety of discourse in both literary and non-literary contexts, including a corpus of parliamentary language data. This book aims to provide insights for the student of literature as well as those interested in the differences between speech and writing more generally. No prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed and an extensive glossary has been provided in the Appendix. As well as addressing newcomers to the study of language, it is hoped that the description of the linguistic and grammatical aspects of the data in a variety of contexts will provide a cross-disciplinary juxtaposition of ideas that is of interest to a more advanced and more general audience. For the student there are the following features: • a detailed glossary of terms which includes examples in context when appropriate • numerous summaries both of arguments and of main factual content • a variety of sample material, ranging from conversations between friends to boxing match commentaries, from Dickens to detective stories • end-of-chapter exercises to provide further work in the area under discussion • a progression of ideas from introductory material to theoretical issues and areas for discussion • in addition to the usual references and further reading sections, there is a ‘Paths to further study’ section (see Appendix) which suggests sources and starting points for students’ own work in the area.

2 INTRODUCTION

For the professional scholar there are the following: • a comparison of speech and writing which retains channel at the centre of the discussion • discussion of the implications of transferring dialogue from one channel to another: from live interactions to exchanges represented on the page; from novel dialogue to film soundtrack • corpus-based case-studies on transcription of parliamentary discourse • the application of linguistic insights in literary contexts which could form the basis of a one-semester module on the topic of speech and writing • sample material and exercises which can form the basis of undergraduate work, theoretical discussion which can be raised with more advanced students. OUTLINE OF THE BOOK This outline aims to give indications to the two main groups of readers mentioned above of which chapters they will find of most interest. Chapter 1 should be the starting point for students. It looks at highly contrasted samples of speech and writing, and introduces the distinction between channel and mode which underlies the approach of this book. The subsequent four central chapters deal with fundamental points at which salient contrasts can usefully be drawn between speech and writing. The chapter concludes with a summary of spoken and written mode features. Chapter 2 moves on to look at similar interactions represented in speech and writing, and would be of interest to the professional scholar both for the underlying discussion and for the comparison of actual conversation with literary exchanges. It pays particular attention to the problems of representing spontaneous interaction on the page and the uses which creative writers make of this transference. Chapter 3 deals with contrasts between individual speakers and writers, and raises the difficulty of comparing the written form, influenced as it is by conventionalising and standardising educational and ideological factors, with the spoken. The discussion of this topic would again be of interest to more advanced students and professionals. Real individual speakers are contrasted with literary speakers, and the problem for the creative writer of conveying individual voices on the page is considered. Chapter 4 gives more practical application of the approach suggested in the book, and looks at the influence of the context of production on samples of discourse in speech and writing. Students may wish to read this chapter in conjunction with Chapter 1 to be provided with an overview of typical features of the two modes, and ways of comparing them. Matching texts in different contexts are analysed—live, spoken commentary on a sports event compared to a subsequent written commentary; screen dialogue from a film soundtrack compared to the original dialogue in a novel—and the limitations on speakers

INTRODUCTION 3

and writers in the light of the contexts of production and reception are considered. Chapter 5 is a more theoretically demanding chapter which looks at some of the wider issues of the nature of speech and writing in relation to the study of language. Professionals and more advanced students may be better equipped to find interest in the implications of this discussion. As well as the wide variety of discourse from which short exemplifying material is taken, a further aspect of the book is the inclusion of case-study data in two of the early chapters (Chapters 2 and 3). These case studies are taken from a larger project on transcription in the British House of Commons, and are intended to provide not only interest in themselves, but also a chance to see conclusions about speech and writing in the context of a larger sample of data (around eighty thousand words). These case-studies are based on the comparison of actual speech during a debate on televising the Commons, and the written record made of it in Parliament, for the Official Report (‘Hansard’). NOTATION Unless otherwise indicated the following notation is used: | || () [] S V C A NP VP AdvP AdjP PrepP […] (.) (..) *

phrase boundary clause boundary embedded phrase embedded/subordinate clause co-ordinated phrases grammatical subject verb complement adverbial noun phrase verb phrase adverb phrase adjective phrase prepositional phrase section of text omitted micro pause longer pause an ungrammatical or ‘ill-formed’ sentence

Chapter 1 Properties of speech and writing

…an identical spoken and written language would be practically intolerable. If we spoke as we write we should find no one to listen: and if we wrote as we speak we should find no one to read. The spoken and written language must not be too near together, as they must not be too far apart. (T.S.Eliot) INTRODUCTION Although it may seem a truism to say it, speech and writing are different, and this is the underlying assumption in this book. Writing shares many characteristics with a mountain: permanent, clearly delineated and readily available for inspection. We see the marks relevant to our language’s system of orthography (the letters of an alphabet, the symbols of an ideographic script) and can return to them repeatedly if need be, finding the words they represent each time exactly as they were on the page during our last reading. Our understanding of the words may change, as, say, we grow older; or our opinion of their import may alter—we may, for example, change our opinion of the ending of Great Expectations or come to understand a line of poetry differently—but the existence of written text permits us to meet identical words again and again on different occasions. Words on the page stand separate from one another, and, if we are reading the text of a competent writer writing non-experimental prose, they usually form themselves into well-ordered and punctuated units beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full-stop, units which we know as sentences. These units in turn form themselves into coherent texts in which the visual qualities of presentation and demarcation assist our understanding. For example, a reader soon becomes so familiar with the meaning of the conventions of punctuation, paragraphing, margins, headings, print size and so on that they cease to think of them as significant aspects of a text. Although, as will be seen, people differ in the emphasis they place on the connection between orthography and the sound system of a language (see Chapter 5 for further discussion of this), the process of

PROPERTIES OF SPEECH AND WRITING 5

reading, for a competent reader, is primarily visual, and the written form of language is anchored in the world of visual perception. When we come to consider speech the position is quite different. Here, rather than a physically unchanging mountain, the more appropriate metaphor is that of the ocean: mutable, shifting, and difficult to capture and define. Speech is a strictly linear process: as each sound is uttered one after another this ordering cannot be altered. When a word is spoken, it cannot be taken back or altered, as we sometimes know to our cost. It may be repeated, or corrected, but each iteration of it gives us a new and different sample of language. Two primary channels As may be gathered from the opening metaphors, this book takes as its starting point the assumption that the two primary channels for human communication: the visual and the oral, are fundamentally dissimilar, and that this affects the forms of language found. A second assumption is that in a literate society our conception of language is strongly influenced by the visual medium in which we are able to communicate. A third principle underlying this work is that the transference of language items from speech into writing and vice versa is by no means a neutral one. The tendency is to think of the process as similar to, say, the translation of a computer file from one wordprocessing system to another. The process has to be undergone for the information to be conveyed in a different context, but the resulting text is unchanged (if the conversion is successful!). This model of unchanged text on either side of a process (in the context of speech and writing the process being transcription/dictation) is a misleading one. A better model is one which hinges on the notion of transmutation, for example, the formation of ice cubes from water. A child soon learns the relationship between water and ice, and knows the level of identity between them; nonetheless, the substances on either side of the process of freezing are quite different, and are fit for quite different purposes. Literate people, who are the describers and analysts of language, can freeze and unfreeze language very easily, so easily in fact that we often lose sight of the sophisticated nature of the process. This chapter explores the influence of the way in which spoken and written discourse is produced by speakers and writers, and perceived by listeners and readers, on the type of language which is used. In addition, some of the problems of comparing speech and writing hinted at above are considered in more detail. For example, the fact that the two forms are very different manifestations of language—the one transient and the other more permanent, the one primarily founded on the aural sense, the other on the visual—raises questions as to the extent to which like can be said to be being compared with like when samples of the two forms are placed in opposition.

6 PROPERTIES OF SPEECH AND WRITING

Some preliminary definitions The central concepts of channel, medium and mode are introduced in this section as sources of insight for the study of speech and writing. These are terms which are used with varying definitions by different linguists, the first two terms (channel and medium) being at times interchangeable. In the present approach, the terms are kept separate and have distinctive meanings. This is due to the fact that when two forms of language are being compared and contrasted, and when the study is undertaken on the basis of samples of actual language data (as opposed to a more abstract, theoretical approach), a clear distinction needs to be drawn between two ideas concerning the way language is produced. The first of these ideas is the notion that the spoken and written forms of language differ at their most fundamental level in terms of the way in which they are transmitted and perceived. Speech is primarily an aural/oral process which takes place through the dimension of time in a strictly linear fashion, and cannot persist through time without a secondary recording apparatus, such as a taperecorder. Writing is a visual/motoric process which, although it is produced through the dimension of time (as all human actions are), has the inherent potential to persist through time, and for different sections to be revisited in the same form, but in a different order, as when we go back and re-read part of a paragraph or sentence when we do not understand. The term used in this book to talk about these two ways of communicating (the aural/oral in opposition to the visual/motoric) is channel. Throughout, the phrases ‘the spoken channel’ or ‘the written channel’ should be interpreted as focusing in broad terms on the means of production and reception of the sample of language in question. However, a fundamental assumption of this book is that the way in which discourse is produced and received has a strong influence on the nature of the language used, and therefore at times a more ‘fine-grained’ discussion of the way in which the discourse is communicated is relevant. For this the term medium is reserved. This term is used to refer to the precise method and/or material substances used to convey the discourse, that is to say, in terms of the spoken channel the sample being analysed might take place over the telephone, on a film soundtrack, or over a public announcement system. As would be expected, given its greater material substance, and the variety of texts (books, electronic screens, shopping lists, graffiti and so on) in which it can occur, discourse in the written channel can be produced via more diverse media than the spoken tends to be. For example, in different circumstances we can choose to hand write or not, to create permanent (or at least less mutable) ‘utterances’ on stone as memorials, or send semiephemeral correspondence via electronic mail. The necessity for these preliminaries about the precise use of terminology is that underlying the approach to the study of speech and writing presented here there is an assumption that some important conclusions about the relations between them and the nature of each can be drawn by moving beyond the one-to-


one comparison of samples of language from the two forms, although this in itself is not a fruitless exercise. As language users we choose between one form of communication and another depending on the limitations of the circumstances and the communicative objectives we have in hand. If, say, we want information to be stable through time and easily available for retrieval we do not go to great lengths to memorise it, or repeat it, unless we do not have the appropriate medium available; in a literate society we create a permanent record via the visual/motoric (for short, the written) channel. This primary channel-oriented choice will in turn have ramifications for the precise medium-oriented choices we make, in terms of the actual means of producing the language. And these channel/medium choices fundamentally affect the potential for typical language use in the two forms. This last concept, the most difficult to pin down but the most interesting, is referred to as mode in the rest of the book, and is returned to in the summaries after the analyses in this chapter. Listeners and readers Another way of looking at these distinctions, and of underlining their relevance to the study of speech in opposition to writing, is to consider the very different needs of listeners and readers who are on the receiving end of language and trying to make sense of it.1 Listeners are under pressure to understand quickly, and in many cases, to respond adequately. A delay in response or an inappropriate reply can have significant and immediate interpersonal results. Several factors influence the capacity of a listener to comprehend adequately, but of central importance is sufficient shared knowledge between speaker and hearer for the latter to ‘get the point’. It can be hard for the outsider to gauge (or understand) the relevance of what is said. This is a problem which non-native speakers often ascribe to linguistic failings on their own part, for example not knowing enough vocabulary, or people speaking too fast for them to understand, but it is a problem which is shared to some extent by anyone not ‘in the know’. For example, if the following is considered: Question: ‘Where’s Rona?’ Answer: ‘It’s Thursday.’ it is not possible to judge whether this contains an appropriate response in the abstract. Initially, it might seem an unlikely answer, since stereotypically we tend to think of a ‘wh’-question of place as requiring a location indicator in the answer; probably we would predict some kind of adverbial phrase: ‘she’s at home’ However, the implication of the reply in the example might make it an adequate answer which would expand to something like: ‘it’s Thursday and at this time every Thursday as you know she goes to her car maintenance class.’ The purpose of this example is not so much to begin an exploration of the deep waters of implicature, but rather to make the more general point that listeners are often in the position of having to get the point, assess their own view, express


some reply, offer another gambit, and so on under the constraints of discourse which takes place face-to-face with immediate processing and time constraints. If they miss the point, they either have to continue to listen passively in the hope that they will gather from some later utterances what is meant, or they have to ask for an explanation. Equally, if they do not time their response accurately, they may miss the opportunity for taking a turn in the conversation, and have difficulty in bringing the discourse back to their topic of interest, The spoken channel is closely bound up with high levels of interactive potential, and listeners, as well as speakers are involved in something akin to ‘performing’ as they seek to comprehend what someone else has said, and then construct and utter their own contribution. In the process of speaking a person must not only consider the informational content of what they are saying (whether, say, it is correct and relevant) but also try to project their own ideas appropriately and effectively, and present themselves to the world of their listeners in a way which engages their attention. That communication is a two-way process involving active participation on the part of recipients is far easier to see in the spoken channel.2 Readers, on the other hand, are in a different relation to the discourse which they are comprehending. They are generally under fewer time constraints and under less pressure to respond actively and immediately to what they have read. The reading-writing process is, to some extent, temporally independent, and although the act of reading takes place in actual time, and in an actual context of location, setting and so on, it does not happen under the same dynamic and mutable circumstances of listening. There are differing schools of thought on the level of influence of context on written discourse, and of the relationship between readers and texts, but in contrast to the spoken channel, the lower potential for immediate response in the written channel (for an interruption, say, or for a request to explain part of a text) brings with it typical features of the language used. For example, since the reader is not usually in the position to ask the writer for an explanation, the writer needs to consider what the potential (often anonymous) reader needs to be provided with in order to understand the text. Whereas a listener can gather the meaning of ‘It’s over there’, and, if they cannot, are in the position to ask for clarification, the same clause in the written channel needs either to be contextualised with care, or expressed using full noun phrases and adverbial phrases: ‘The front door key is under the flowerpot’ (for definitions of terms used in grammatical analysis see Glossary, pp. 149–64). Creative writers may choose to make life difficult for readers (consider the opening of The Sound and the Fury or Finnegans Wake) but the key point is that competent writers learn to take readers into account, whether or not they subsequently treat them to a dose of confusion for artistic purposes.


Some problems of comparison In a literate society we are surrounded by the visual impressions made on us by the written form, and it is difficult to believe that language is anything but a stable and permanent entity. Dominated as our conception of language will tend to be by the tangible form rather than the less permanent one, it is hard to realise that the spoken channel is fundamentally temporally dependent, and that there is an important imbalance between the two forms, a skewing which makes direct comparison between them problematic. Some sense of the problem can be arrived at if we ask ourselves which form we can have access to more of if we want to analyse the two: speech or writing? Our immediate response might be ‘speech’, because, if we consider all the billions of people in the world, and the fact that only when there is some pathological reason does the normal child not learn to speak, an unimaginable number of utterances are produced every minute of the day on this planet. However, even with modern recording techniques, only the tiniest fraction of any moment’s spoken material taken as a whole throughout even a single community can be captured and analysed. And this brings us up short in our answer, since we can only have direct access to a tiny amount of spoken material, whether in our own immediate experience, or, as a professional analyst, a slightly extended sample of recorded material. We know that billions upon billions of words are being spoken at any moment, but each contribution is transient and after it has been uttered few can remember the precise wording, even only seconds after it has been spoken. When we speak, the major part of what we say passes out of time without a trace, usually lasting little more than our breath does on a mirror. In contrast, texts produced in the written channel accumulate, willy-nilly, through time. Indeed, this is the most salient and practically useful aspect of the written form. Whereas a deliberate effort has to be made in the spoken channel in order to capture discourse (mechanical sound-recording and transcription, for example), it takes a specific act to eliminate written material. Even in the electronic age, words on paper dominate life in a literate or even semi-literate society, and any reader can have access to words written in other ages, and other places, if they have the capacity and inclination to read them. Therefore, in terms of which form we have access to, and have samples of in the medium for which it was intended, the written is the inevitable winner. In attempting to answer the question ‘which is there more of for analysis’ we have immediately come up against a basic problem of comparability between the two forms due to the channel differences which exist between them. And this does not exhaust the problems we encounter in answering the question of quantity. If we turn to the medium of recorded speech and look for a point of comparison in the written, the first thing which springs to mind is the printed book. Both present language in a medium which can be reduplicated time and again. Yet this process of reduplication which is the physical manifestation of the act of capturing or publishing someone’s language does not happen equally in both


channels. When we value someone’s words highly we tend to translate them from the spoken channel, in order to capture them. For example, we transcribe great speeches, or write down a child’s amusing utterance. The written is seen as not only a more convenient means of capturing and keeping discourse, it also carries with it a cultural and ideological value associated with education, publishing and the arts. Discourse in the written channel has, as it were, a built in ‘recording mechanism’ and is therefore the optimal means of conveying and storing ideas which a society wishes to transmit over time. The spoken, on the other hand, is primarily suited to the ‘one off’ utterance which serves a purpose in a particular context, but which is not needed in its exact form at a later date. Not only is the written by nature more permanent, and more amenable to analysis, it is also, because of these very characteristics, the medium through which the major part of linguistic analysis takes place. It is very difficult, even if the object of study is particular speech sounds, to undertake description and analysis directly from the sound medium without recourse to some system of representation in the written channel. Quite apart from any intuitive sense that our impression of language is strongly influenced by the written form, this representational fact alone makes the relationship between the two forms of fundamental importance and interest in the study of language (see Chapter 5 for further discussion). Speech and writing in society In the previous paragraphs an asymmetry was pointed to as existing between the two forms in temporal terms, with the spoken form’s transient nature being brought to the fore in contrast to the more permanent and recording functions of the written channel. Continuing the discussion which focuses on readers and hearers as an important factor in determining mode choices, a second area of imbalance, and therefore of potential influence on the two forms, is the process of the production and reception of texts in a society. Yesterday I read a variety of written material from among the following: part of a novel, e-mail messages, instructions to a CD timer, parts of a newspaper, students’ essays, correspondence relating to work, the label of a wine bottle, notices relating to changes in library opening times. These are texts which spring to mind because they were actively read. In addition to them, I would also have been surrounded by thousands of written words to which I paid little or no attention—book-titles on shelves; slogans on billboards; lettering on vans and lorries; road signs and a plethora of other graphic representations of language. The navel-gazing exercise of contemplating the texts read by myself serves the purpose of highlighting some of the paradoxes thrown up in analysing the relationship between speech and writing. The first of these relates to the imbalance between producers and recipients of written texts. Even in the most literate societies the texts that are read are produced by fewer people than are


expected to read them. Whereas speaking usually takes place to a small number of known listeners, the writer is generally conveying ideas to a larger number of recipients, who may well be unknown and anonymous. Furthermore, where reading and writing are the skills of an educated élite, then the readers and writers of texts are more likely to be the same small section of the population whose literacy skills separate their communication from the majority of the population. These factors serve to keep the mass of spoken language different in terms of structure, style and content from written mode. The second point brought out by a consideration of the nature and variety of written texts around us is that the ability to read ‘switches on’ an access to texts which is only restricted by such things as legibility. The conventionalised spelling and presentation of written texts (especially in the printed medium)3 allows the person who has been through a process of education in a literate society to comprehend a wide selection of texts, even texts which are not aimed at him/her as reader. Once the text is launched into the public domain, special steps need to be taken if access to it is to be restricted. This fact applies even to private material such as diaries or letters, which, unless a conscious act is taken to destroy or hide them, can remain available to any reader in future time. Vast quantities of written material are ephemeral and have a limited ‘shelf life’: newspapers, junk mail, shopping lists, and so on. Nevertheless, it is in the nature of discourse in the written channel to have the potential for permanence, a potential which means that, while a writer may produce a text with regard to a specific reader or readers, once it has been produced the text takes on a degree of independence from the text producer who cannot later easily control or even know the recipients. The process of becoming a competent writer is partly that of gaining an ability to assess the needs of an often anonymous reader, and frequently a set of people, rather than an individual. These factors contribute to the general tendency for the written form to be less dependent on immediate context, more explicit in the way ideas are expressed and less personally oriented, both in terms of the text producer and the reader. That is to say, since a text may have to be read and understood by people with a very different perspective on the world, the writer must at the very least take this fact into account when producing language in the written channel. The visual/motoric nature of writing, and its concomitant greater permanence and tangibility serve to make it more suited to the public sphere of communication, to the expression of ideas which require a degree of permanence, to the dissemination of ideas to a wide and diverse audience. To put it more strongly, discourse in the written channel is fundamentally defined by these characteristics and therefore is inextricably linked to the public, institutional or establishment aspects of communication as opposed to private, individual or innovative ones. This is not to say that the written channel does not serve these latter aspects at times, but the point is rather that the distinctive nature of writing creates a set of potentialities and limitations on writers and readers in terms of


what can be expressed and understood. These in turn have a ‘knock-on’ effect on mode, that is, the type of language produced. Dependent as it is on a set of fairly stable conventions such as punctuation, spelling and generally standard grammar, writing that is extremely individualistic runs the risk of quickly becoming incomprehensible to all but the text producer (and even to the text producer if some time passes between the writing of the text and the subsequent re-reading—we have all experienced the incomprehensibility of our early student lecture notes, taken at speed and with random abbreviations and utterly meaningless by the time revision comes around). This discussion is taken up again in more detail in Chapter 3, when I turn to how individuals express themselves in the two channels. For now, the point is that the defining characteristics of the written channel tend to make discourse in it more explicit, impersonal, conservative and oriented towards a status quo which reflects the powerful societal influences of education and the printed media. When we turn to a consideration of discourse in the aural/oral channel (as before, this will be referred to for short as ‘the spoken channel’), the situation is rather different. Unlike writing, which has its basis in a system of clearly delineated graphical signs which, if they are to ‘work’, must adhere to public, pedagogically sustained conventions, speaking, as was noted above, is essentially intangible in its substance and is the optimal channel of interpersonal, private discourse. Furthermore, the nature of the spoken form, mutable and passing from mouth to mouth, often beyond the reach of standardising influences, means that it sustains a far greater diversity of forms. All humans naturally learn to speak, and the spoken channel is the primary means of communication between people. Although the process of becoming a fully fledged speaker in fact takes many of our formative years, it is shaped largely by non-institutional forces, such as family and influential peers, and is generally (in a literate society) not regarded as part of education as such.4 The way in which we speak, therefore, tends to be more strongly marked by the speech patterns (both in terms of sounds—accent and intonation; and in terms of form— word choice and grammar) of family and friends than is the way we write. Paradoxically, therefore, although the primary means of communicating, and the one to which all members of a society have access is speech, the greater tendency for diversity in the spoken channel means that even speakers of the same language can misunderstand one another quite easily. This incomprehensibility of speech may not only stem from a speaker having a marked accent, such as Glaswegian, but also from the private speaker-listener orientation of much casual speech. The nuances, and sometimes even the basic meaning, of utterances in a private conversation can be difficult for an outside observer to grasp. Summary of introductory discussion The written form of language is frequently thought of as a parasitic, secondary system which is a direct reflection of the spoken form. In terms of human


development (both of humankind and of the individual), the written channel is undeniably a later development, relying as it does on delicate motor skills. It is not the place here to go into an extended discussion of theoretical points about the nature of the relationship (this is undertaken in more detail in Chapter 5), but rather to approach the concept of channel as an influential, if not defining, factor on the type of language used. That is to say, to use insights about channel to help us find more general points about typical mode in the two forms. To summarise, so far the nature of the two channels—primarily aural/oral and primarily visual/motoric—has been taken as the starting-point for an investigation of factors underlying the discourse produced via the channels. This led to the conclusion that the salient facts about the spoken channel are that it is produced in a strictly linear fashion through time and is essentially transient. In contrast, the written channel was defined as being fundamentally less transient and therefore amounts to a means of not only conveying information, but also recording it. Two further aspects of the way in which the two forms of language are produced were noted as being definitive. The first was that the spoken channel has a high potential for immediate interaction between producers and recipients and that this leads to the spoken channel being a medium for the projection of, and the reflection of, personality and personally oriented behaviour. This was contrasted to the second factor: the lower interactive potential of the written channel and the concomitant potential for impersonality. These areas of underlying contrast in the way in which language is produced were also considered in terms of the difficulties they lead to in terms of comparison. The previous discussion suggested that the nature of channel can lead us to preliminary conclusions about speech and writing, and that these conclusions can be reached without recourse to separate concepts of, say, appropriateness or style typical of a genre. These latter concepts tend to muddy the waters in any comparison of speech and writing, and draw atten tion away from an investigation of the nature of the two forms per se. It is tempting to say such things as ‘speech is informal’ and ‘writing is formal’, or less baldly, ‘writing is more formal than speaking’. But if we stop to think about these statements, it becomes clear that they are hard to justify. We can easily find examples of informal writing, and of formal speaking. If we rephrase the statement in a watered down form—‘most speech is less formal than writing’, or something similar—then we may be closer to the mark. However, the aim of this book is to investigate essential differences between speech and writing, as opposed to assessing the probability that any given sample from either mode will show a particular characteristic. The reasons behind this are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.


ANALYSIS OF SAMPLE DISCOURSE FROM SPEECH AND WRITING The rest of this chapter will take the notions about the nature of the two forms which were generated by our discussion of channel and contrast samples of language in terms of these. Two of the samples are taken from contexts which show speech and writing at the ‘extremes’ of discourse in terms of the factors seen as underlying channel: permanency versus impermanency; private and interpersonal versus public and abstract. In order to show these contrasts the most ephemeral type of discourse—a private, casual conversation—is contrasted with a sample from a printed academic textbook, which is chosen to represent the public, impersonal and less transient end of the spectrum. The strengths and weaknesses of this approach are then discussed. The spoken channel This section looks in more detail at the nature of primarily aural/oral communication in terms of the influence of the way the discourse is produced (i.e. the channel, as defined above) on the type of discourse that is produced (i.e. the mode). Spoken discourse is primarily aural in terms of its reception, and oral in terms of its production. This is not to say that aspects other than the aural/oral do not play a large part in many instances of communication, for example gaze and body language in face-to-face conversation, or the actions which are seen accompanying a sports commentary, or the gestures of an air-hostess as the safety features of an aeroplane are explained to passengers. Indeed, there are relatively few situations where one has to depend solely on the aural in order to understand what is being said. Some people even find it less easy to communicate via the telephone where there is no recourse to the visual. Nonetheless, it is useful in a study of speech in opposition to writing to consider the aural/oral aspects separately from any other accompanying visual features. As before, this primarily aural/oral means of producing and understanding discourse will be given the shorthand title ‘the spoken channel’. The notion of other influential contextual features is returned to in Chapter 4. Casual conversation The data in this section are based on a short sample originally produced in the spoken channel (and now transcribed into the written channel for analysis)5—an extract from a spontaneous conversation between friends. The extract exemplifies non-public and interpersonally oriented language use, and has a high potential for interactivity. Furthermore, the content was essentially ephemeral (the friends are discussing what to do that evening). The sample chosen will be discussed briefly in the light of these factors, before a detailed analysis of the way the channel-based factors influenced the type of language that was produced.


While the nature of the written channel makes it ideal for the dissemination of ideas for public consumption in a stable, standardised and conventional form, the spoken channel, being essentially transient and usually shaped by its producers ‘on the hoof’ (see pp. 8–10 for a fuller discussion of this), is more suited to nonpublic and interpersonally oriented discourse. The present example is clearly in this category. A second aspect of channel which was isolated above was that of the different level of potential for interaction which is offered by language used in the two channels. The spoken was seen as having a high potential for immediate response by an interlocutor, whereas the nature of the written channel means that is has a far lower potential for such a response. In this casual conversation, within certain limits of politeness and turn-taking, the three speakers have an equal opportunity to contribute to the discourse. While the original casual conversation was typical of a style of discourse which is not intended to have a ‘shelf life’ beyond the immediate functions and concerns of the participants (the arrangements for the evening, and the expression of opinion about opportunities for going out), the fact of transcription has transfixed the exchanges and fossilised them for an observer. However, we can gain a sense of the transient, interpersonally oriented discourse of the original channel. Three levels of comparison—discourse, grammar and lexis—are each examined in turn, and the influence of the way in which the language is produced, the original channel, is considered. The aim, in general, is to show how the original channel of production works to limit and shape the discourse, producing the typical mode features which we are interested in. The three speakers in the first extract, Sample 1, are friends who are having tea together and chatting casually about their plans for the evening. They are young women, students, who know one another well. The contributions have been numbered for ease of reference. Sample 1

1 <S 01 > Shall we go down the pub tonight or 2 <S 03> Yeah 3 <S 01 > What, Coracles or the Blue Boar 4 <S 02> The Blue Boar 5 <S 03> Don’t like the Coracles very much 6 <S 01 > I don’t really not really much happening 7 <S 03> No…no nice blokes [inaudible] 8 <S 01> [Laughs] 9 <S 02> [Laughs] 10 <S 03> There isn’t anywhere in Carmarthen though is there 11 <S 01> I don’t know 12 <S 02> You can hardly talk can you


13 <S 01 > Ooh ooh ooh gossip there isn’t any gossip is there 14 <S 02> [Laughs] 15 <S 03> If there’s a man and Carmarthen there’s gossip 16 <S 02> [Laughs] true true (CUP/Nottingham corpus) A casual conversation between friends depends on co-operation between the contributors whose input creates the discourse. It is not usually a matter of who can say the most, but rather a process of eliciting and giving the right kind of responses. A pause, or a lack of a response to an observation or comment can be a sign that there is a problem in the conversation. The high potential for interaction which was noted at being a defining characteristic of the spoken channel means that in conversational settings the distinctive texture of the discourse is created by more than one person, and the shape which the conversation takes on reflects the dynamics existing between the participants. This is unlike institutionalised forms of spoken discourse such as a political speech, an academic lecture, or a business presentation, where a dominant speaker is allocated the active speaking role, and members of a passive listening audience abdicate their rights to contribute during the event. The nature of casual conversation is bound up with the nature of the spoken channel. In the face-to-face, spontaneous interactions of human beings we can witness the means by which personalities are projected on to the world and relations developed. The contributions—the initiating remarks, responses, jokes and laughter—which can be seen in Sample 1 show little evidence of preplanned speech, and, while the talk does conform to some of the typical regularities of exchanges (question and answer, and so on), the precise nature of the sample and the way it unfolds are governed and shaped by the people who are involved. The process of transcribing a section of a conversation has the effect of presenting it for analysis as a completed artefact. However, for those involved in the production of the discourse the outcome of their remarks — whether they would be understood, whether there would be quick agreement or prolonged discussion, whether their funny comments would be well received—cannot be known at the moment when they are speaking. In this way, spontaneous spoken discourse, of which casual conversation is the archetypal example, directly reflects the personalities of those involved as they seek to understand one another and, at times, control the thread of the conversation or elicit a particular response. The immediacy of contact, the split-second timing, the potential for loss of face if there is a misunderstanding, the nuance of emphasis and intonation, which are all bound up with communicating in the spoken channel, are largely lost in the translation of the living conversation on to the page. Creative writers often have a strong sense of the conversational interaction as a chance to convey characters’ personalities, and use the representation of speech as a tool for conveying important features of their key figures. However, there


are several interesting and problematic aspects to the creation and presentation of imaginary dialogue. The problem for the writer of dialogue in the novel or for the screen and stage is that not only does some of the dynamism which is lost in the process of taking an interaction from one channel and placing it in the other need to be replaced, but the writer also has to work within the conventions of reader expectation. These points are dealt with in more detail in the subsequent chapters. The present issue is that the artefact we examine as outsiders, particularly when it is presented via the visual written channel, is a very different kettle of fish from the conversation as it happened. It is impossible for the analyst to gain anything but a flavour of the event, and even when analysing a conversation in which one has taken part it is hard to regain a sense of the specific interpersonal dynamics which took place. Having said all this, there now follows an analysis of some of the discourse features present in the textual artefact: the transcript we are considering. Discourse features In the present example, the discourse falls naturally into two halves (1–9 and 10– 16) each marked at their end by laughter as a response to an intentionally funny remark by Speaker 3. As such, Speaker 3 is a dominant and influential speaker, despite the fact that the turns are shared more or less equally between the three contributors (Speaker 1 making six contributions and the other two speakers making five), since it is she who shifts the discussion away from making arrangements, by interpreting Speaker 1’s ‘not much happening’ as relating to ‘blokes’: 6 <S 01 > I don’t really not really much happening 7 <S 03> No…no nice blokes [inaudible] 8 <S 01> [Laughs] 9 <S 02> [Laughs] and evades the same speaker’s request for ‘gossip’ with another humorous remark: 15 <S 03> If there’s a man and Carmarthen there’s gossip 16 <S 0> [Laughs] true true In the first stage (1–9) Speaker 1 is the main explicit initiator who both instigates the discussion ‘Shall we go down the pub tonight’ and tries to make the decision more specific: ‘What, Coracles or the Blue Boar’. On the other hand, Speaker 3 becomes the more overt ‘leader’ of the conversation in the second half when she tries to initiate a more general discussion of the shortcomings of Carmarthen’s nightlife: 10 <S 03> There isn’t anywhere in Carmarthen though is there


Table 1.1 Breakdown of discourse contributions for three speakers in Sample 1 (casual conversation)

Speaker 2 is notable for having a mainly reactive role in the discourse. The different number and type of contributions to the discourse can be seen clearly if they are tabulated (see Table 1.1). Column three of Table 1.1 shows turns (i.e. contributions to a conversation) which have a ‘pivotal’ status, being uttered as responses to an earlier contribution, but in themselves acting as response elicitors. Speaker 3 again shows some dominance in having two such ‘hidden’ initiating moves. The complex interplay between these friends even in this short example from the spoken channel brings out the strongly interactive and personality-oriented (as well as personally-oriented) nature of spoken discourse. In it we can see how the course of a conversation can be changed or moved tangentially by a dominant speaker, and how the spoken channel helps to carry forward and confirm roles and relationships between people. Grammatical features The complexity of the grammatical features found in casual conversation often stems from a high incidence of a characteristic called ellipsis. This is a complex concept which basically hinges on the notion that something is ‘missing’ from an utterance or clause, but that it can be understood because of the surrounding discourse and context. In the written channel, where ideas tend to be expressed in complete sentences with an initial capital letter and a closing full-stop, the idea is relatively straightforward, and in some cases it is obvious in the spoken what could be ‘recovered’ (‘missing’ (ellided) elements are placed in square brackets): 5 <S 03> [I] Don’t like the Coracles very much


However, many of the contributions that are made to spontaneous conversation need their contextualising topic and/or initiating move in order for the ‘missing’ items to be understood, and even then the analyst often has a variety of choices with which to fill the ‘gaps’. If we take contribution 6 from the extract—‘I don’t really not really much happening’—a possible interpretation is: I don’t really [like the Coracles either?]. [There is?] not really much happening [there?]. But other wordings could be possible: I don’t really [like it]. [I think that] not really much [is] happening [at the Coracles at the moment]. And in some cases the recovery job, while capturing the sense of what the speaker probably intended, has to create an entire clause from, say, part of a prepositional phrase, as in contribution 4: 4 <S 02> [I would prefer to go to] The Blue Boar In the spoken channel language users can afford to be extremely economical in the way they construct utterances. Indeed, were they to express their ideas in the full forms suggested above, they would sound like non-native speakers who tend to cling to full sentences as being ‘correct’ when their communication would be improved by using less complete clauses. However, most, if not all, systems of grammatical description are based upon complete, isolated sample clauses (which tend to be closer to written mode). Therefore, spontaneous interactive discourse presents the analyst with particular problems. The first of these is whether and to what degree the gaps should be filled in, and the second is how to match the distinctive complexities of an utterance like: 10 <S 03> There isn’t anywhere in Carmarthen though is there to the frequently less than appropriate grammatical apparatus available. These two problems relate to one another, and to the higher-level issue that the grammatical system as presently described seems more geared to discourse in the written channel than in the spoken. If a principled decision is taken to analyse the utterances delivered in the spoken channel as they stand, then some new way of treating an expression like: 6 <S 01 > I don’t really not really much happening which contains verb phrases which are ‘incomplete’ by ordinary standards (‘don’t like’ and ‘is happening’) is necessary. On the other hand, if a description is made which is based on ‘filled out’ clauses, there comes a point at which the object being described is altered to such an extent that one has to question whether it is the same entity. The problem can be fleshed out by an attempt to analyse the extract in some detail (see Table 1.2). The principle here is to describe the utterances with standard grammatical terms. Single-word utterances such as ‘Yeah’ and laughter have


been omitted from the analysis. Rather than attempting to recover a large quantity of ellided material, where a noun phrase is used without any contextualising clause the term ‘noun phrase topic unit’ has been coined in order to capture the functional status of the words. The important point to note is that each of these contributions to the conversation is non-standard in some way, if one does not try to ‘recover’ an underlying structure.6 These ‘deviant’ forms range from the structurally standard clause ‘I don’t know’, which simply contains an abbreviation that is typical of spoken mode, to ‘I don’t really not really much happening’ which is nearly incomprehensible when transcribed and without the contextualising exchange. The spoken channel permits and favours structures which reflect the highly interactive nature of the channel. These include unfinished clauses, the use of noun phrases in place of complete clauses and question forms, with particular use of ‘tag-questions’. These latter types of clause, which take the form of an appropriate auxiliary or modal verb (be, have, do, can, would, etc.) followed by a repetition of the subject of the associated previous clause, are usually dealt with briefly in standard grammars. They are strongly associated with spoken mode, particularly since the meaning of structurally identical questions is altered by the choice between a falling or rising intonation pattern (a falling intonation tends to suggest that the speaker expects the listener to agree, whereas a rising intonation can imply surprise, hesitancy or doubtfulness). In the extract from the conversation between the women three tagquestion clauses are used in quick succession (one by each of the participants): <S 03> There isn’t anywhere in Carmarthen though is there <S 02> You can hardly talk can you <S 01 > Ooh ooh ooh gossip there isn’t any gossip is there The use of these structures marks the discourse as constructed interactively, with each speaker explicitly seeking a response by using a tag-question as a prompt for further comments. This phase of the conversation is ended when the speaker who dominates the exchanges by provoking laughter rounds off the section with the epigrammatic ‘If there’s a man and Carmarthen there’s gossip.’ When utterances contain a verb, the usual criterion for a section of language to be called a clause, the clause is generally short (see Table 1.3). Not only are the clauses short, with the longest containing seven words, but the phrases which make up the constituents of the clauses are also short, with the co-ordinated complement ‘a man and Carmarthen’ being the longest. The grammatical subjects are particularly simple, consisting of pronouns or the ‘dummy’ subject ‘there’ of existential sentences. To summarise, the grammatical features which are marked in this example of spontaneous conversation are: a high level of ellipsis, for example noun phrases working as complete utterances (‘The Blue Boar’, ‘gossip’), ‘missing’ subjects (‘Don’t like…’) and verb deletion (‘I don’t really’); expletives (‘Ooh’); tag-


Table 1.2 Grammatical features of Sample 1 (casual conversation)

questions; existential clauses; and non-standard forms (such as ‘what’ instead of ‘which’, ‘is’ instead of ‘are’). Several of these very common features can be ascribed to the nature of the channel. For example, expletives or tag-questions are indicative of interactive discourse; the deletion of clause elements is only possible when language-users are confident that the people they are communicating with can ‘fill in’ the missing elements, and for this to be the case the interlocutors need to be able to know instantaneously if there is a break in understanding. The simplicity of the grammatical subjects, the shortness of the clauses and the propensity for existential clauses are typical of discourse created without time for great reflection, planning or editing. These are the types of grammatical feature, together with lexical features (which I deal with below), which relate strongly to


Table 1.3 Analysis of clause structure for Sample 1 (casual conversation)

the way in which the discourse is produced (the channel) and go to make up spoken mode. Lexical features The extract shows the low lexical density typical of spontaneous, interactive speech, with over twice as many grammatical words being used as lexical words (51 to 23) (for definitions of ‘grammatical’, ‘lexical’, etc. see Glossary, pp. 149– 64). The extract is too small for any useful statistical conclusions to be made about the type/token ratio, but a non-statistical description shows up lexical ‘echoing’ of the central topic items (Blue Boar (2), Coracles (2), gossip (3)). In terms of word length, the majority of the items are below three syllables/eight letters and are simple, core vocabulary. As would be expected, Speaker 3, who shows a greater propensity for the performance aspects of speech, uses both the core term ‘man’ and the non-core ‘blokes’. As was seen with the grammatical features, the channel of production can be seen influencing the type of language produced, with a tendency for simplicity over complexity in terms of the lexical choices made. The vast bulk of daily speech is of the kind shown in Sample 1 (p. 17), but there are several speech contexts where simple clauses and vocabulary will not be appropriate, for example an academic lecture or business discussion, and in these contexts pressure is put on language producers to create language which goes beyond the norms of spoken mode, despite being presented in the spoken channel. The following sample shows a speaker working under these kinds of pressure. Radio broadcast Sample 2


The (.) moral imperative (.) of providing (.) short-term assistance in the form of humanitarian aid (.) has (..) in a funny way come to occupy (.) centre place in policy making and prevented the emergence (.) of actual (.) policies about (.) what (.) should be done in regard to the larger conflict (..) er a very (.) clear illustration of this is the way in which (.) the delivery of humanitarian aid in (.) Bosnia has been (.) used and very understandably so as a justification (.) for not engaging in tougher military action… (Professor Adam Roberts, speaking on Analysis, BBC Radio Four, 5 Oct. 1995) Here the brackets indicate short pauses, with a single dot indicating a ‘micropause’ and the double dots indicating a longer pause. Discourse features The radio broadcast of a recorded contribution to a discussion has a longer ‘life’ than a casual conversation (not least because the programme was repeated on two different days, and would then become part of archive material with a potential for reproduction). The contrast here is between discourse which, although it has been recorded, was produced by speakers with little thought to their words existing beyond the lifetime of their interaction, and more deliberatively produced discourse spoken with a view not only to a public audience, but also to an audience removed in time.7 This example, since it was produced for public consumption and has a low potential for interaction, has many points of contrast with the previous sample from the spoken channel (p. 17). It is produced by one speaker for an audience made up of a primary listener, the interviewer, and a more influential set of secondary listeners, the subsequent audience of the broadcast programme. The speaker produces this discourse under the twin pressures of knowing that he is being recorded and that his speech must be fluent, error-free, and coherent, and that his audience is wide. Grammatical features In terms of grammar, the discourse is more complex than the casual conversation, and the difficulty of constructing some of the sections is reflected in the micropauses (indicated by (.)) as the speaker assesses the acceptability of the next phrase he is going to utter. The underlying structure is relatively simple with two co-ordinated clauses linked by ‘and’, followed by a main clause with the verb ‘is’ (‘a very clear illustration…is…’) (see Table 1.4). However, within the clause constituents of subject and complement a lot of information is crammed (see Table 1.5): In this case the main headword of this grammatical subject is ‘imperative’ which is post-modified by a series of nested prepositional phrases culminating in


Table 1.4 Clause structure of Sample 2 (radio broadcast)

Table 1.5 Sample analysis of noun phrase structure for Sample 2 (radio broadcast)

the lowest head word ‘aid’, and the words ‘assistance’ and ‘form’ are also pre- or post-modified. The difficulty of constructing this complex subject in the spoken channel is reflected in the three micro-pauses the speaker has to make. The complement of the final clause is again highly complex. It begins at ‘the way in which…’ with a relative clause post-modifying ‘way’ and then complex noun phrases at subject and complement position within this clause. This level of complexity is not typical of spoken mode, and as well as the pauses which indicate the effort of producing this type of discourse in the spoken channel, the speaker uses various strategies to hedge what he is saying. While the example is notable for having no adverbial constituents of time, cause, place and so on, it does have phrases similar to sentence adverbials or adjuncts which indicate the speaker’s opinion or stance towards the information he is giving. Thus, this speaker pauses quite noticeably before stating that ‘the moral imperative…of…humanitarian aid’ is the first priority in policy making and makes the statement less categorical by adding ‘in a funny way’. Similarly, when he is pointing out that humanitarian aid has been used as a justification for avoiding military action he adds ‘and very understandably so’. These asides and caveats would not appear in this form in a written version of these ideas, as an author would have the time to phrase the information in such a way that his stance was obvious and he would have greater confidence that the discourse was saying precisely what he intended with little room for misconstrual. Lexical features In terms of lexis, this sample again is more complex and diverse than the previous example from the spoken channel. The balance of lexical words to grammatical words is closer to half-and-half (38 lexical to 40 grammatical, counting ‘come’ as a semi-auxiliary) and, whereas the casual conversation


contained mainly simple one- or two-syllable words, this sample shows a variety of polysyllabic vocabulary. Further evidence of the speaker ‘performing’ under the pressure of the context of a broadcast is the tendency to redundancy, for example ‘the emergence of actual policies’, ‘in regard to‘or ‘the way in which’. Summary of spoken channel features The spoken channel is by nature mutable, and although we can analyse a complete conversation in the static written channel it must be remembered that this is not the entity which was originally produced. Casual conversation is prone to the vagaries of topic change, misunderstandings, and gen eral evidence of interpersonal factors working on the discourse. While much conversation follows a degree of patteraing, particularly at moments of greeting and parting, the precise turns which it will take are in the hands of the participants who may choose to keep silent or respond, question or comment, attempt to initiate laughter or change the topic. When spontaneous discourse from the spoken channel is presented as an artefact for analysis in the written channel, it is difficult to recall that at the moment when (particularly initiating) moves are made the speaker is doing something akin to performing to an audience, and that this audience’s response in itself creates and demarcates the potential for ensuing moves. This mutable and temporally bound aspect of speech allows the discourse to reflect the dynamics of the relationships between the participants particularly clearly. A transcript of a spontaneous conversation shows evidence of the direction the discourse took—which topics became central, whose jokes worked —and as such retains a sense of the interpersonal orientation of the spoken channel, despite the representation in the written channel for purposes of analysis. In Sample 1, the three participants had differing levels of contribution to the conversation, and one speaker tended to dominate, if not in terms of volume of words, then in terms of steering the discourse and its topics. The fact that conversation takes place in ‘real time’ means that the participants have little opportunity to rehearse their contributions, and indeed, the unpredictable nature of much spoken discourse means that there is no potential to rehearse what to say. This in turn means that the spoken channel favours the expression of ideas in a ‘performance-oriented’ manner. That is to say, if a speaker is to get air time, and be listened to, he/she needs the capacity to direct the discourse towards the relevant topic, and then make a relatively concise contribution before the floor is taken by another speaker. These capacities are strongly dependent upon personality, whereas the written channel promotes skills which are quite different in nature (see below and Chapter 3 for further discussion). Many of the distinctive qualities of the grammatical structures employed —‘unfinished’ clauses, abbreviations, short clauses and simple phrases — reflect the pressures of language production and reception in the spoken channel.


Equally the simple vocabulary and repetition of items show the influence of discourse being produced spontaneously with little time to edit utterances. Such features can be outweighed in less casual contexts, for example, the interview candidate will weigh their words with care, and may try to impress with their articulateness. This was seen in the radio broadcast sample above, where the speaker managed to produce complex constructions and densely packed information in the spoken channel. Nonetheless, however careful the speaker is, the spoken channel does not allow a word to be taken back once uttered, and even when one is reading from a prepared script or delivering rehearsed lines, the tongue may slip. Speaker concerns about the construction of the discourse and the reception of the content were evident in the more formal discourse of the radio broadcast and showed themselves in the tendency for hesitation and the comments explaining speaker stance to the topic. In a conversational setting the speaker does not know how long the listener will allow the floor to be held, and therefore the tendency will be for short phrases which get the message over quickly. This was reflected in the tendency for short clauses with few words per contribution in the conversational data. The different context of reception of the radio broadcast provided the speaker with the opportunity to ‘hold the floor’, which in turn put him in the position of having to speak articulately and fluently. Under these circumstances there is a tendency for speakers to fall back on redundancies in order to give themselves time to think. Analysed after the event, these features of speech which can be interpreted as products of the pressure of the channel on language users, support generalisations such as ‘speech is less grammatically complex than writing’ or ‘speech conveys ideas in a simpler fashion than writing’. Nevertheless, while each individual clause of a conversation may be simple when it is written down and analysed, there is a highly complex process of interactivity and ellipsis at work between the language producers. This issue is taken up again in Chapter 2. The written channel In the section dealing with samples from the spoken channel (pp. 15–28) the nature of the means by which language is produced and comprehended were taken as a starting-point for an investigation of aspects of discourse, grammar and lexis which could be ascribed to typical spoken mode. In this section dealing with the written channel a similar approach is taken. As in the discussion of the spoken channel, a short sample is analysed which is chosen to show the channel factors at their most extreme. The written channel is primarily visual and static. While there exist marginal examples of moving text (for example, electronic public notices or some subtitling on television) it is the nature of most written text to be based on the visual recognition of combinations of elements from a finite set (a relatively small set in


the case of alphabetic scripts) along a stable vertical or horizontal axis (depending on the conventions of the language being written). Just as it is possible to translate speech into the written channel, it is equally possible to articulate written words in the spoken channel, that is to say, to read aloud. Nonetheless, the defining characteristic of the written is not this potential for presentation in the oral channel, but rather that its stable visual qualities allow it to perform elaborately non-oral functions. The stable nature of written text permits close comparison both inter- and intra-textually. That is to say, once a sample of text is created it may be compared, word by word and sentence by sentence, with another text, and, equally, sections within a text may be re-read and compared with other sections. Such detailed comparisons are not characteristic of the spoken channel, and are difficult to carry out without recourse to sound-recording equipment and, usually, the written channel. The following example shows the effect of these features of the written channel working at their most extreme, since the text is from a permanent and public printed medium—the published book—and, second, the text is difficult to comprehend without repeated readings. Academic text A single sentence from an academic text will be sufficient to exemplify many of the points to be made about the written channel, although for a more detailed consideration of cohesion, a longer sample would be needed. (See also end-ofchapter exercises for further discussion.) Sample 3 is from a philosophical work, Wittgenstein on the Foundation of Mathematics, discussing a relationship between the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of language. Sample 3

Both views will regard our acceptance of the necessity of a statement as signposted by an abrogation of the ordinary practical standards of defeasibility for a generalisation postulating the availability of a satisfactory, conflict-dissolving explanation for any situation in which things are prima facie other than as the statement in question requires. (WFM Chapter XXI) Lexical features The densely informative nature of this academic text is reflected in the lexis which has a high incidence of polysyllabic words of non-Anglo-Saxon origin (‘abrogation’, ‘postulating’, ‘conflict-dissolving explanation’ and so on). In addition, the ratio of lexical words to grammatical words is high (28 to 24) with


nearly half the total tokens being accounted for by content words as opposed to structural words. As before, the sample is too small for any useful statistical conclusions, but whereas in the first spoken sample (the conversation) several of the lexical items were repeated (approximately 40 per cent), less than 20 per cent of these types occur more than once. When a comparison is made of the nature of the types which are repeated the spoken conversation again contrasts with the written, showing repetition of central topic nouns (names of places etc.), a higher incidence of the verb ‘be’ and the marker of existential sentences ‘there’. On the other hand, the written sample shows little repetition of nouns (‘statement’ (2)), and there are no occurrences of the verb ‘be’. Additionally, whereas Sample 1 shows no occurrence of the indefinite article (a/an), which marks a use of nouns in a less concrete way than the definite article (the), it is used four times within the space of a single sentence in the written passage. There is significantly less contrast between the spoken discourse which was created for public consumption, and with a non-present audience in mind. Indeed, the proportion of lexical words is, perhaps surprisingly, lower in this sample of academic prose than in the radio broadcast. Nevertheless, the presentation of the lexis with some repetition and redundancy, and the grammatical context with the information presented in separate clauses makes the radio broadcast data appear less dense. Grammatical features The most distinctive feature of Sample 3 is that it takes the form of a single, fifty-two-word sentence. Not only is the informational content abstract and sophisticated, it is also presented in a way which is difficult to assimilate without repeated readings. The basic structure is that of subject, verb and complement (Table 1.6) with the addition of a highly complex structure (‘as signposted…requires’) which makes up the bulk of the sentence, and the function of which is difficult to analyse at first. Table 1.6 Clause analysis of Sample 3 (academic text)

Initially, this ‘as-structure’ gives the impression of being adverbial in function (since it answers the question ‘how’). Nevertheless, the structure is obligatory (i.e. for the sentence to be grammatically complete), since the meaning of the verb would change if the sentence ended at ‘necessity of a statement’—compare: Jane regarded the view from her window (regard=look at) Jane regarded the comment as an insult (regard=to have a view on) This is an example of ‘circumstance as object complement’ (that is to say, it gives further information about the first complement—in this case ‘our acceptance of the necessity of a statement’—which is termed the ‘object’ in traditional grammar). The bulk of the information and the complexity of this


sentence falls in this part of the clause, and can be shown by bracketing the elements which go to make it up (verbs are italicised and their clauses shown by square brackets): [signposted by an abrogation of the ordinary practical standards of defeasibility for a generalisation [postulating the availability of a satisfactory, conflict-dissolving explanation for any situation [in which things are prima facie other than as [the statement in question requires]]]] There are four clauses nested within the structure (marked by [] above), two nonfinite and two finite. This fact, in addition to the many levels of embedded phrases, makes the text difficult to comprehend. As the numerous brackets at the end of the sentence suggest, the reader has to retain a sense of which words are modifying which head nouns over the distance of many prepositional phrases. Although a speaker might utter this sequence of ideas in this form, indeed, the sentence can perhaps be better understood if it is read aloud with different intonations for different parsings, few, if any, listeners could comprehend it after one hearing. The text depends on the potential for close and repeated readings in a way which the spoken channel cannot easily permit. Additionally, the reader of such a difficult text is in a less interpersonally demanding position than the listener would be. Faced with such an abstract and complex series of ideas the hearer must choose to accept that they cannot understand or show their incomprehension by asking for a repetition and explanation. On the other hand, the reader can return to a difficult passage many times, even over a period of years, and develop their individual understanding of the ideas it contains in their own time and without a need for any loss of face in direct communication with the producer of the ideas. In this way the written channel not only permits the presentation complex ideas in a dense format, ideas which could only be expressed and understood with great effort in the spoken channel, it also allows ideas and information to be assimilated with little or no direct personal involvement between the producer of the ideas and the recipient. The present example was chosen because it was an extreme case of the complexity with which information may be presented in the written channel. Nonetheless, however simple and reader-friendly the text may be, the same channel-based factors hold. The essential characteristic of the written channel is a stable, graphically presented medium (whether printed or handwritten) which persists through time without alteration and is amenable to close re-reading and reduplication if necessary. Discourse features The permanency of the written channel, and the potential it presents for extended discourse such as the novel or the academic text, lead to contrasts at discourse level in terms of a comparison of speech and writing.


Whereas it is a characteristic of the spoken channel to permit a high level of interaction, and for samples of spontaneous discourse to show evidence of interactivity, the written channel places high value on the individual language producer, and permits sustained contributions from one individual which show little evidence of interactivity (either in the process of producing the final text, or the final text as found). Although the text of a book usually undergoes several revisions, is commented on by expert readers and editors, and then rewritten, the product which is finally presented to the public is largely free of evidence of this process. Acknowledgement of assistance is generally handled within set conventions and the responsibility for the text remains with one (or, less frequently, more) named author. In this way the published book sustains the notion of prolonged, coherent and densely informative language use by an individual who creates a highly accurate and polished text in isolation. Summary of written channel features A short sample of material from the written channel has presented some typical mode features which can be pointed to as reflecting the pressures and potentialities of the written channel. Most evident was the dense presentation of information in embedded clauses and phrases, rather than the more easily comprehended forms of separate clauses and less embedding more typical of spoken mode. While it is possible to present ideas in this compact and complex manner in the spoken channel, it is rarely possible for even a highly articulate speaker to do this without some evidence of the performance pressures this entails—for example, in the radio broadcast sample the ideas fell into distinct ‘chunks’ bounded by hesitations and pauses, and the speaker felt it necessary to enter some caveats to explain his stance towards the ideas. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This chapter began with a discussion of the terms channel, medium and mode as they are used in this approach to speech and writing. In particular, the influence of the way discourse is produced and perceived by language users, whether it is primarily visual/motoric as in writing, or aural/oral as in speaking, was considered as a factor affecting and limiting the type of language produced. Whereas it is relatively straightforward to discuss channel, which is a fact associated with any sample of language, the associated mode features are more abstract and difficult to pin down. However, if we are going to be able to say anything that is true of all or most cases of spoken discourse, or of written discourse the term is a useful one. On the basis of the discussion of channel pressures and potentialities, together with samples from the two channels, some mode features have been brought out,


and these are listed below, together with some other typical features which were not evident in the small samples discussed. Spoken mode features: Grammar:

• the tendency to ellipsis ((0) don’t mind) • the abbreviation of verbs (he’s) • the ability for phrases, particularly noun phrases to stand as complete utterances • simple and short clauses, with little elaborate embedding (particularly within noun phrases) • high incidence of co-ordinated clauses • the use of ‘and’ as a loose continuation marker • problematic clause analyses, for example ‘topic and comment’ structures: ‘my mum she’s great’ • active verb forms Lexis: • low lexical density • tendency for less abstract vocabulary • tendency for more generalised and simpler vocabulary, and semantically ‘empty’ prefabricated fillers, such as ‘you know’ • use of terms that depend on the context of production for their understanding Discourse: • discourse produced by more than one participant • high incidence of markers of interpersonal dynamics (tag-questions, discourse markers, interruptions and unfinished clauses) • repetition and echoing between speakers • reformulation and refinement of utterance, sometimes by co-operation between speakers • indication of the presence of the author of the discourse, either because of the nature of topic, or in more formal settings the tendency to hedge ideas and show stance Written mode features: (Many of these can be assumed to be the opposite of the spoken mode features listed above, for example, passive constructions.)


Grammar:

• full phrases and clauses with little abbreviation or ellipsis • standard grammar in terms of word order and sentence construction • longer and more complex clauses with embedded phrases and clauses, particularly in the form of densely informative noun phrases • explicit and varied marking of clause relations, for example, use of subordinating conjunctions between clauses (‘whereas’, ‘if’, ‘because’) or sentence adverbs (‘However’, ‘In addition’) Lexis: • high lexical density • complex vocabulary and the use of more abstract terms with a higher incidence of words of Greek or Latin origin • greater variety in choice of vocabulary with lower levels of repetition Discourse: • explicit presentation of ideas to a non-present audience • few markers of interpersonal or personally-oriented discourse • explicit indication of text organisation, such as paragraphing or the term ‘see below’ • discourse presented as product of single participant This is not to say that samples from either channel may not be found which show features more typical of the mode associated with the other. The radio broadcast sample discussed above shows this at work. Equally, a writer may deliberately seek spoken mode in the written channel for some reason, for example, an advertisement may be written in a ‘chatty’ style, or a creative writer may write naturalistic dialogue which purports to present realistic speech in the mouths of characters. The aim in this chapter has been to show how channel can influence the type of language produced. The next two chapters take some of the insights about mode in speech and writing and relate these to broader issues in language and literature. EXERCISES Task:

Record a few minutes of conversation. If possible, do not tell the participants that you have done this until after the recording. Transcribe your sample using (.) to indicate short pauses and (..) to indicate longer pauses. Try to indicate whether speakers overlapped with one another by indenting the overlapping speech to more


or less the place where it started in the previous speaker’s utterance. You can make this clearer by putting in a square bracket at the point where an overlap begins: Speaker 1 Speaker 2

D’you want to go out tonight? [ Yeah

(a) What problems did you encounter? (b) Did you find any of the spoken mode features discussed in the summary given above? Task:

Prepare a five-minute talk on a topic that interests you. Present the talk (if possible to an audience). Record yourself. (Alternatively, if you can find someone to co-operate, ask them to prepare a talk, or you can find a formal broadcast from the radio.) List any features which are similar to the radio broadcast, and look for any spoken mode features. Task:

Find four samples of writing from different contexts (for example, letters; advertisements; textbooks; novels). Do they resemble any of the examples so far discussed? Do any of the texts in the written channel show spoken mode features? Task:

Look at the following extract, and assess it in the light of the conclusions of this chapter. How useful is the concept of mode in your analysis? Well, the thing about our knowledge of the brain is this: If you look at the rest of the body, we have a pretty shrewd idea of what everything does. We know what the kidneys do, and even what the thymus does, which is something we didn’t know when I first started in these fields… (Interview with Francis Crick, transcribed in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1/ 1 (1994), 10) Task:

People using the written channel for informal, personal communication often mimic spoken mode. Collect some examples of letters, postcards, e-mails from friends and analyse them for spoken mode features. Task:

What problems does the fact that you can find spoken mode features in writing and vice versa bring to the issue of comparing speech and writing?


FURTHER READING Biber, Douglas (1988) Variation across Speech and Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Gillian and Yule, George (1988) Discourse Analysis (Chapter 1), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M.A. K. (1989) Spoken and Written Language (2nd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. (1994) Language as Discourse, Harlow: Longman. Olson, David R. (1994) The World on Paper, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, David R., Torrance, Nancy and Hildyard, Angela (eds) (1985) Literacy, Language and Learning: the nature and consequences of reading and writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah (ed.) (1982) Spoken and Written Language: exploring orality and literacy, Advances in Discourse Processes, vol. IX, Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tottie, Gunnel and Bäcklund, Ingergerd (eds) (1986) English in Speech and Writing: a symposium, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.

Chapter 2 Interactions on the page

INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter I considered the influence of channel on the type of language produced, and one of the features of the spoken channel which was particularly salient was the high potential for interaction permitted by the dynamic, face-to-face context of production of most discourse in the aural/oral channel. This chapter takes this further, looking more closely at the nature of spoken interactions, and discussing how these ‘translate’ into the written form when writers seek to show characters interacting verbally on the page in a dialogue.1 While both speech and writing could be described as being fundamentally interactive, since both are produced in order for humans to communicate one with another, the interactive potential for spoken discourse is far higher than it is for written. Certain genres of writing, such as electronic mail, show that the channel can be made to function in such a way that the interactive aspect is higher, but in general the nature of writing means that it is not suited to the production of immediate ‘real time’ communication and response between people. The process of writing is relatively laborious—we need a system of shorthand, excellent typing skills, or some other mechanised system of syllable reproduction, such as that used to prepare live sub-titling on television, if we are to produce it at anything like the same speed as speech. Additionally, a written message is a unit-like item which is generally complete and selfexplanatory, ready to be physically presented to the recipient, read and, if necessary, responded to. These features hold good even if the interlocutors are physically near, for example two students sitting next to one another holding a written exchange during a class or lecture when they are not allowed to speak. It is difficult to interrupt a writer, partly because of this unit-like typical structure. Writers have a responsibility to produce something which they judge will need little elaboration/explanation since the process of message production, reading and response is quite tedious. These factors mean that written discourse is more

36 INTERACTIONS ON THE PAGE

generally associated with, and ideally suited to, sustained, individual, noninteractive communication. In the domain of speech, on the other hand, the process is usually not that of neat, complete units being presented for examination by the recipient who in turn presents a message as a response (although many models of linguistic interaction still imply that this is the case, and until very recently English language teaching texts presented conversation in the form A-B-A-B, with speakers indeed producing rigorously distinct utterances, one after another, with no overlapping or half-finished sentences). Speech production is, generally, a less ‘labourintensive’ process than writing. Speakers can produce many more words per minute than writers under normal circumstances, and in a conversational setting, there is the possibility of overlapping with another speaker, asking for clarification or repetition, interrupting, pausing, changing tack, and so on. These differences in typical circumstances of production mean that the concept of interactivity is a fruitful place to look for differences between the two forms of language. When writers try to convey interaction they are representing a process that is alien to the channel which they are communicating in. They have at their disposal a variety of visual and punctuation conventions to assist the signalling of dialogue. In English prose-writing this is shown by the indentation of each speaker’s utterance, the starting of a new speaker’s speech on a new line, the use of ellipsis marks or dashes to show pauses or interrupting speech, and so on. However, as the rest of this chapter will show, these conventional signals to readers serve more as a code to signify that dialogue is being represented, than faithfully to present a close reproduction of the actual process of dialogue as it tends to occur spontaneously. Moreover, when writers do present something closer to real interaction, choosing to show hesitations, false starts, interruptions and overlaps, these features are often used as a second coded message to convey heightened emotion of some kind on the part of their characters, such as anger, fear or uncertainty. The rest of this chapter is divided into four main parts. In the first some typical features of real spoken interactions are discussed. These are then contrasted with some examples of literary exchanges, and the issue of what happens when spoken interaction is ‘translocated’ to the page for creative purposes is considered. Then I look in rather more detail at a literary conversation and discuss the manipulation by the writer of the presentation of disfluency features. I then move on in the final section to look at how the points made about spontaneous exchanges and literary constructed interactions relate to a transcription of naturally occurring speech in a case-study of parliamentary language and interaction. ACTUAL VERSUS LITERARY INTERACTIONS This section compares and contrasts actual interactions from a corpus of speech with conversational exchanges found in literary contexts.

INTERACTIONS ON THE PAGE 37

Typical features of actual interaction in speech Spoken discourse with a high interaction potential (as opposed to monologic discourse with a restricted interaction potential, such as the lecture) tends to be a process of ‘give-and-take’, with participants having the opportunity to assess the reaction of listeners, and work towards a consensus of meaning together as they speak. Since the speakers are physically in each other’s presence, they have an immediate sense of whether what is being said is understood, and this comes both from non-linguistic actions such as gaze or eye-contact, and other, linguistic, reassurance (called back-channel) such as voiced agreement. Furthermore, if we move away from the A-B-A-B model of interaction beloved of language teaching books, where each person takes a neat turn in the conversation, we can see how actual interaction is a weaving together of contributions into a satisfactory whole which is the shared product of the interlocutors. Co-operation between speakers The following brief extract from the CUP/Nottingham corpus of spoken English, showing an interaction between two friends, gives a typical example of how speakers co-operate to create discourse. The speakers are two men, and they are chatting together in a beer-garden outside a pub. They are catching up on news after a period of not seeing each other: Sample 4

<S 01> Are you still playing er <S 02> Gui-tar <S 01> Irish music, yeah <S 02> No I don’t play very much now, no, not at all (CUP/Nottingham corpus) Analysing real spoken data can be confusing at times, and it is useful to stand back from the exchanges you are investigating to look for any broader structures you can isolate. Here, the basic exchange of ideas could be seen as a straightforward question and answer: Question: Are you still playing Irish music? (Speaker 1) Answer: No (Speaker 2) We can call this the underlying structure,2 and use this as a starting point for our commentary on the exchange. The second speaker predicts what form the question will take, and the topic, and overlaps with the word ‘guitar’ before it is finished. When it is written down, this intervention looks ‘messy’, and as if the second speaker has broken into the utterance of the first. However, such overlapping is often evidence of a well-oiled conversation,3 rather than a problematic one, as, by predicting what will be said, and giving a suggested


completion for an utterance, listeners show themselves to be ‘in tune’ with the speaker (and also prove that they are listening!). By completing the utterance they show that they have the confidence that they know enough about the speaker to contribute in this way. Over the interpolated utterance, the first speaker continues his question with the word ‘yeah’ tagged on at the end. It is noticeable that the single speaker’s utterance of the words making up the question cannot stand alone if they are extracted (unlike the question in our putative summary given above): Question: Are you still playing Irish music er yeah * any more than the single word contribution ‘guitar’ by the second speaker can make sense without its context. It might therefore be more accurate to represent the first stage of the interaction, the question, as having a shared source: Question: [Are you] still playing (Irish music/guitar)? (Speaker 1, Speaker 2) In his response to the question which he has helped to shape, the second speaker moves from ‘no’ through ‘I don’t play very much’ to ‘not at all’ as he formulates an answer. Once transcribed on to the page and available for scrutiny this reply takes on an ambiguity (i.e. the scope of ‘at all’) which it almost certainly did not have for the interlocutors. The salient thing, and the point which the second speaker is going to go on to explain, is that the response is in the negative, and whether the final meaning the speaker intended is ‘I don’t play very much at all now’, or ‘I don’t play very much now, in fact, I don’t play at all’, is not relevant to the listener (who could, in any event, chip in with ‘what, not at all?’ to check he had understood correctly, and would have had intonational clues to assist him). Summary To summarise, even in this very brief interaction several points about naturally occurring exchanges can be seen. The first is that that which looks chaotic on the page is not necessarily evidence of a disrupted or messy conversation. Second is the fact that whereas we tend to think of interaction in terms of speakers taking turns at speaking, and being individually responsible for a functional/ informational structure (a model which writers tend to adopt when constructing dialogue), the process of actual communication disrupts this neat picture since speakers often co-operate to share, check or produce a meaning. Third is the notion that transcribed speech retains strong evidence of the temporally dependent medium in which the original discourse was produced. Thus, although a logician might have a nightmare about the semantics of the second speaker’s reformulated answer, moving as it does through negative, to qualified negative, to strongly negative, these stages only take on problematic status with the leisure and scrutiny permitted by the written channel. It should always be remembered,


when analysing speech-written-down, that, for most speakers, if they have a rough idea of what the other speaker meant—a kind of working interpretation— they are usually more interested in the current utterance (whether their own or another’s) and seeing whether this fits in with their understanding of the discourse being produced, than in scrutinising the last thing said in any great detail. In this sense, comprehending conversation in which you are involved is a process of accretion and accommodation between speakers, as an understanding of what is being said builds up through the lifespan of the interaction. This process is not the same for a third party uninvolved in the interaction, and I will be returning to this point below, when considering how writers represent interactions for readers. Sharing responsibility for an utterance In the following example of spontaneous interaction (Sample 5) similar processes can be seen at work, but in a rather more elaborate way, and with an even more marked blurring of the ‘responsibility for utterance’ lines. In this case the two speakers are young women. The setting is once more informal: they are having a cup of tea together with another friend (who does not join in this part of the discourse), and chatting. They are sitting on the floor. One of them finds a broken earring and holds it up for the others to see. They give their opinion of it, and assess how it would have looked before it was damaged. They decide that it had another part originally to make it symmetrical (‘even’): Sample 5

1 <S 02> It’s an earring it’s an earring 2 <S 03> Oh lovely oh, lovely 3 <S 02> It’s fallen apart a bit but 4 <S 03> It’s quite a nice one actually, I like that, I bet, is that supposed to be straight 5 <S 02> Yeah 6 <S 03> Oh I think it looks better like that 7 <S 02> And there was another bit as well another dangly bit 8 <S 03> What, attached to 9 <S 02> The top bit 10 <S 03> That one 11 <S 02> Yeah…so it was even (CUP/Nottingham corpus) Looking for underlying structure here, the exchange could be interpreted as follows: Statement:

Here is an earring (Speaker 2)


Assessment: Conclusion:

It’s nice (Speaker 3) It’s damaged (Speaker 2) Originally there was another part which made it even. (Speaker 2, Speaker 3)

As was the case with Sample 4, the interplay of contributions from the speakers is more complex than this summary suggests, and the evidence of speaker co-operation towards shared meaning is even more marked than in the previous example of the exchange between the two male speakers. This is shown by the need for a joint attribution to the two speakers of the ‘Conclusion’, even in the initial summary. In Sample 4 the second speaker was required to respond to a question eliciting information from him, and as such there was a relatively clear initial apportioning of the ‘responsibility’ for the source of ideas. The two speakers might be concerned to show willingness to co-operate to sustain the conversation, as their overlap (‘guitar’—‘Irish music’) suggests, but there is one speaker who has the primary role of questioner, and the other of respondent — an assessment of the balance of contributions which is sustained by the continuation of the extract where the second speaker goes on to explain at some length about why he no longer plays. So, although there is some evidence of the speakers sharing the construction of utterance, the overall effect is of a clear source of the initial enquiry, and of the producer of the responding discourse being distinct. There is no such clear-cut distinction between the speakers in Sample 5. The three informational/functional categories seen as underlying the exchange (statement drawing attention to the object—assessment of the object — conclusion) are not neatly shared out between the speakers. Particularly during their movement from assessing the object to their conclusion as to how it looked originally, the speakers combine their utterances through interruption and overlap in order to show their opinions. Their ease with one another in this process is signalled from the start of the interaction, the second speaker echoing the repetition of the first: <S 02> It’s an earring it’s an earring <S 03> Oh lovely oh, lovely Bending the rules of conversation When speakers are conversing informally with friends there is quite a degree of leeway to ignore what might be considered the niceties of interaction (sometimes referred to as conversational ‘maxims’; see Grice 1975): to speak when it is your turn; to listen to what the other person is saying; not to follow your own train of thought selfishly and speak over another speaker. While the second speaker could be forgiven for chiming in with ‘oh, lovely’ after the first ‘it’s an earring’


(not knowing there would be a repetition), there is less excuse for breaking in before the other speaker has a chance to finish her clause of contrast: <S 02> It’s fallen apart a bit but <S 03> It’s quite a nice one actually, I like that, I bet, is that supposed to be straight In turn, the other speaker, <S 02>, does not enter in to the process of giving her opinion of the object by responding to ‘I think it looks better like that’ with a ‘yes’ or ‘mm’, but rather pursues her own train of thought as she visualises the original state of the object. The continuation of this idea, and the lack of a responding ‘move’ after the expression of positive opinion, is marked by the use of ‘And’: <S 03> […is that…] <S 02> Yeah <S 03> [Oh I think…] <S 02> And there was another bit as well another dangly bit As in the first example, there is evidence of the refinement of utterance: ‘another bit’—‘another dangly bit’, and shared contributions (‘attached to’ — ‘the top bit’—‘that one’) as they seek to clarify whether they agree on the original shape: <S 02> And there was another bit as well another dangly bit <S 03> What, attached to <S 02> The top bit <S 03> That one <S 02> Yeah…so it was even Summary In both these short extracts of transcribed real speech, lasting no more than a couple of seconds in each case, some of the complexities of interacting in English can be seen. Two main points to be noted are that aspects of interaction which look ‘messy’ and incoherent in a written transcript, for example speakers talking over one another or appearing to ignore what has just been said, were, in all probability, not in the least like this for the participants. On the contrary, such features can be evidence of a smoothly running conversation between people who are in tune with one another. Second, and this is related to the latter point, spoken conversation gains its distinctive complexity and texture from the fact that it is the primary source of feedback to humans about their relations with other humans. Much of the content of daily interactions is banal in the extreme; nevertheless, during spoken interaction, particularly informal conversation, we project ourselves on to the world of discourse and gain a sense of the extent to which our perspective on things is shared by others. It is largely through the process of this type of communication, as opposed to the contents of the utterances, that we get a feel for how far we are ‘on the same wavelength’ as others. That split-second pause before the answer to an invitation can tell us


more about ourselves in relation to our peers than we could gain from the content of their reply. Spontaneous interaction, therefore, shows many features which are concerned with sustaining the dynamics of the process of communication. Speakers monitor what they are saying, listeners show that they are listening and frequently the participants become speaker-listeners as they co-operate to communicate with others. It is a process that requires (literally) splitsecond timing if we are to get our turn to speak, or if we are not to appear rude. However, we tend only to recall the dynamics of a conversation when the process of accommodation and co-operation has failed—when we have misunderstood a person’s meaning and have had to ask them for clarification, when we were interrupted unexpectedly, when the telephone conversation ends abruptly—in these circumstances we may have a very clear recollection of the exchange (usually at three o’clock in the morning), otherwise we carry away from an interaction a ‘residue’ of what was said, but not an accurate recollection of the actual process of communication with all the disfluencies caused by the intricate juggling act of speaking and listening. In investigating speech we come up against a paradox. That which readers see as chaotic on the page when actual speech is transcribed is not so for the original producers of the discourse. Overlapping and interrupting, changing tack and reformulating are normal features of interaction. Complete utterances divided off from those of the next speaker by pauses are much more likely to be a sign of a ‘difficult’ conversation. The preconception of what smooth running discourse is like feeds into, and affects, what writers present (or are able to present) when they attempt to convey interaction in a literary setting. The next two sections show the way this residual picture of how interactions work comes to be represented, and manipulated, by writers. Some literary equivalences The following literary exchange (Sample 6), taken from Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, has some features in common with Sample 4 (p. 39) which was discussed as an example of actual interaction. Both involve ‘smalltalk’ between two male friends; both open with a query about the other person. Both also include a ‘mismatch’ of understanding. In Sample 4 it is the very slight example of the difference between ‘guitar’ and ‘Irish music’, here there is a more significant example of being at cross-purposes (the misinterpretation of the referent of ‘work’): Sample 6

‘How is your work getting on?’ said Ravelston presently. ‘Oh, as usual. It’s a drowsy kind of job. Swapping backchat with old hens about Hugh Walpole. I don’t object to it.’


‘I meant your own work—your writing. Is London Pleasures getting on all right?’ ‘Oh, Christ! Don’t speak of it. It’s turning my hair grey’ ‘Isn’t it going forward at all?’ ‘My books don’t go forward. They go backward.’ (KAF Chapter 5) In addition to being similar to Sample 4 in terms of interlocutor, this short extract also shows a parallel in terms of exchange function in that it has an underlying structure of question and answer, and could be represented by: Question: How is your writing progressing? (Speaker 1) Answer: Badly (Speaker 2) The foregrounding of misunderstanding In Sample 4 the slight mismatch in terms of the scope of the question (rather than the instrument, the type of music is the topic introduced by the questioner), is smoothly incorporated into the discourse with the overlap suggesting cooperation between the speakers, and the questioner indicating that there is no need to distinguish between the two terms really by using the word ‘yeah’ as he finishes the question, and the respondent contributing to the formation of the question he is about to answer: <S 01 > Are you still playing er <S 02> Gui-tar <S 01 > Irish music, yeah The misunderstanding between the two men in the literary exchange takes on far greater emphasis, and the structuring of the interaction has implications which link to broader issues of characterisation in the book as a whole. Additionally, there is no evidence of the blurring of the lines of responsibility for utterance seen in both the real exchanges described above. The improbability issue If we imagine this conversation happening in real time, it seems obvious that the questioner, Ravelston (Speaker 1), would have realised fairly soon after the responder (Gordon Comstock, Speaker 2) began his reply that Gordon has misunderstood his question. At the latest this would have happened when he utters the word ‘backchat’, which it is difficult to interpret as relating to writing: ‘How is your work getting on?’ said Ravelston presently. ‘[1] Oh, as usual. [2] It’s a drowsy kind of job. [3] Swapping backchat with old hens about Hugh Walpole. [4] I don’t object to it.’ ‘I meant your own work—your writing…’


Nevertheless, Ravelston lets him finish four ‘sentences’ (two of these do not have main or finite verbs: ‘Oh, as usual’ and ‘Swapping backchat…’, but are presented in graphic terms as complete items with initial capitalisation and a full stop), before correcting him, and makes no attempt to interrupt him. The exchange could have been written as follows: Sample 6a

‘How is your work getting on?’ ‘Oh, as usual. It’s a drowsy kind of job. Swapping backchat…’ ‘I meant your own work—your writing. Is London Pleasures getting on all right?’ However, there would have been two disadvantages to this version. First, from a reader’s point of view, the broken-off utterance ‘Swapping backchat…’ is confusing, and even annoying: we can hardly understand the two words in isolation from the completion of the sentence, and we are left feeling that Comstock might have been going to say something interesting, but we will never know. Second, from the author’s point of view we lose an opportunity for the central character to give his attitude to his work, and, perhaps more importantly, an opportunity for a pleasing formal contrast and balance in the writing (discussed below), a structural nicety which actual interaction rarely shows. Using real speech as a model for literary exchanges Indeed, if we used the actual spoken interaction discussed earlier as a model for this literary exchange difficulties would arise: Sample 6b

‘How is your ...?’ ‘Writing.’ ‘…work getting on, yes.’ ‘Oh, Christ! Don’t speak of it. It’s turning my hair grey.’ The first difficulty is deciding how to present overlapping speech, since without the convention of layout adopted in linguistic transcripts this is hard to show. The second difficulty is in the presentation of an overlap as part of an unmarked interchange between speakers. In transferring this kind of interaction to the page, Comstock is made to sound agitated, and unduly eager to break in. Finally, this presentation, as was the case with the previous rewriting, does not provide room for the type of content the writer wanted to include to convey broader implications. To understand the larger significance of this misunderstanding between the two men, and the associated need for Comstock to go on at some length about the job before being corrected, a little background from the story is useful.


Gordon Comstock, a poet, develops an almost pathological hatred of money, and gives up one ‘good’ job after another. The book traces his gradual decline as his refusal to take part in his society takes effect. At the end of the book, finding that his girlfriend is pregnant, he ‘gives in’, marries her, and rejoins mainstream society. Given the difficulty with which the poet Comstock holds down a job, his interpretation of ‘your work’ as referring to his daily grind for money, rather than his pursuit of writing, is interesting. He speaks of the job in an airy, off-hand way, as if seeking to impress Ravelston with his condescending attitude to the ‘old hens’, his colleagues. This easy style is in marked contrast to his reaction when he realises what Ravelston was actually asking about: ‘Oh, Christ! Don’t speak of it. It’s turning my hair grey.’ The casual tone of his initial response needs to be built up over a few sentences in order for the contrast to be brought home. His ‘Oh, as usual’ is balanced by being transformed into ‘Oh, Christ’, and the informal participle clause structure ‘swapping backchat…’ changes to a sequence of ‘full’ sentences, culminating in the somewhat melodramatic and ponderous: ‘My books don’t go forward. They go backward.’ As elsewhere in Orwell, much of the interest lies in the difficulty for the reader of distinguishing the attitude of the writer to his central character. Perhaps in this problematic interaction and the misinterpretation of Ravelston’s question we get a sense of Comstock’s real self, off-guard, as it were, and are given a prefiguring of what he will become when work will really, and always, mean his job rather than poetry. Manipulating readers’ perceptions of speech Another way in which writers can take advantage of the ‘translation’ of interactions on to the page is for the purposes of humour. In the following extract from Martin Chuzzlewit the two speakers have quite different understandings of how the discourse will proceed. Dickens manipulates readers’ perceptions of speech cleverly to promote the joke. The extract gives part of a conversation between the innocent Tom Pinch and Mr Fips. Tom has been given a mysterious and delightful job (cataloguing a library, which, although it may not be everybody’s cup of tea, is highly satisfying to him) by an unknown benefactor. The mystery surrounding the job exercises his imagination and each time he meets the intermediary who arranged the matter (Mr Fips) he hopes that he will learn more of his employer. Sample 7

‘Oh! by-the-by, Mr Pinch, you needn’t mention it, if you please!’ Tom thought he was going to tell him a secret; so he said that he wouldn’t on any account, and that Mr Fips might entirely depend upon him. But as Mr Fips said ‘Very good,’ in reply, and nothing more, Tom prompted him:


‘Not on any account,’ repeated Tom. Mr Fips repeated ‘Very good.’ ‘You were going to say’—Tom hinted. ‘Oh dear no!’ cried Fips. ‘Not at all’—However, seeing Tom confused, he added, ‘I mean that you needn’t mention any particulars about your place of employment, to people generally. You’ll find it better not.’ (MC Chapter XL) Despite the fact that Tom Pinch is simple almost to the point of imbecility, it is hard to imagine that had the words ‘you needn’t mention it, if you please’ been uttered in the correct tone for Fips’ intended meaning (i.e. ‘don’t mention the previous thing we talked about to anybody’) they could have led to this confusion. Pinch understands the pronoun ‘it’ as pointing forward to a referent to be dealt with later in the conversation (an example of cataphoric reference), whereas Fips is referring beyond the discourse to the mysterious arrangements about Tom’s job (exophoric reference). The word ‘it’ can be ambiguous, but speakers and listeners are generally very sensitive to this and are aware of intonational signals available to assist meaning. A speaker using ‘it’ cataphorically (pointing forwards) in the way Tom thinks would usually not emphasise the verb ‘mention’ and would signal the clause as background/introductory by lowering the pitch and speeding up towards the real meat of what they wanted to say. The ‘limitations’ of the page allow Dickens to present as opaque that which would not be so off the page. It would be interesting to know how Dickens would have treated this page-based trickery in one of his reading performances, where he would need to choose between Tom’s interpretation and its accompanying intonation (thus making Fips a confusingly inept speaker) or Fips’, (making Tom an incompetent listener). Such an effect can only work if the reader does not pause to fully verbalise the utterance, and is an example of the hybrid nature of constructed dialogue. Summary As with much literary dialogue, the interaction between Tom and Fips, like the extract from Orwell, would not, and could not, occur in real life in quite the form it is found on the page. This is not a criticism of the writing. The need to bear readers’ needs in mind, the limitations of the visual medium (for example, we do not have a conventionalised means of setting out overlapping speech in literary writing, as opposed to linguistic transcriptions), together with the concerns of the writer to show something significant in the dialogue, rather than the banalities of daily life, work together to keep literary and real interactions apart. Partly, of course, this distinction is due to the fact that literary conversations are constructed by writers for readers, rather than by interlocutors for one another. The effect of this is to highlight the interaction, for example a misunderstanding, even further, since readers know that in a literary context the


creator of the discourse has chosen to present this interaction, in this particular way, for their perusal. We may overhear such an interchange on the bus, but we feel no inclination to interpret it beyond the immediate setting, as it is generally felt to be part of the random process by which we ‘rub up against’ the discourse of others in a public context. Literary dialogues therefore are artefacts, and distanced from real interactions on two levels. Because of the lack of potential, we might even say the impossibility, of representing the fluid process of spoken exchanges on the page, writers must adopt a conventional system for encoding interactions and allow the reader to feel as if they are ‘hearing’ an interchange between living people. A second factor which works to distance written, literary conversational exchanges from real ones is the fact that they are constructed with an ever-present eavesdropper in mind, the reader. Therefore, many literary interactions are more helpful to this third party than actual conversation overheard would be. In the next portion of analysis the issue of the nature of the choices made by writers in terms of how interactions are presented, and who is allowed to speak in them is discussed. Further from actual dialogue The example which follows is from a detective story called The Case of the Tudor Queen by Christopher Bush. The extract has some features in common with the exchange between the two young women about the earring, Sample 5, (p. 41): two people assess a small object found on the floor. However in this case the people involved are male, and rather than casual conversation the exchanges are between detectives looking at clues at the scene of a murder and assessing their import. Sample 8

Travers drew Wharton’s attention to the smashed bead on the floor. The General ran his glass over it. ‘Doesn’t look like a bead to me,’ he said. ‘More like an earring. Wait a minute though. I know what it is. It’s the top of a fountain pen.’ [Travers draws his attention to another clue, a chip of paint, but any words spoken by him in this process are not represented, and Wharton continues speaking] ‘Looks like a paint chipping to me. You’d better hang on to it till we see if there’s any green paintwork in the house.’ (TQ Chapter 3) The most immediate and noticeable difference between this extract and .the assessment in real life by the two young women of the earring is the fact that


only one speaker voices an opinion about the object. In terms of the underlying structure it could be pared down as follows: Statement: Assessment: Conclusion: Statement: Assessment: Conclusion:

Here’s an object (Speaker 1, non-verbalised) It’s not a bead (Speaker 2) It’s more like an earring (Speaker 2) It’s the top of a fountain pen (Speaker 2) Here’s an object (Speaker 1, non-verbalised) It’s like a paint chipping (Speaker 2) We need to keep it in order to identify it further (Speaker 2)

Dominance by one character The second speaker dominates the interaction by means of the very fact that the first speaker’s words do not reach the page. The assessments and conclusions about the objects under discussion belong firmly to one speaker with the second placed in a passive role of quiet listener. The role of the first speaker, Travers, is to bring the clues to the attention of the other detective. We can imagine that he would do this by means of spoken words, just as the speaker in the real-life interaction about the earring in Sample 5 does—for example: ‘Here’s something you might be interested in’—and might make some response or suggestion during the musings of the other speaker, even if they come from a superior officer. A charitable interpretation of this extract might see the exchange as mirroring the power relations between these two men, or might see the reduction of the spoken discourse to that which is necessary to carry forward the story as merely evidence of the process that is prevalent in literary conversations (that is to say, the removal of the often banal exchanges to do with maintaining discourse). However, the effect of this imbalanced interaction is quite deadly and mechanical. The presentation of spoken discourse between characters gives the opportunity for the writer to show them as beings independent from the narrative. For the duration of the exchanges, the reader is asked to be directly in the presence of the characters, to hear what they have to say for themselves, and how they react to one another. This example wastes the opportunity, and the reader, rather like Travers, is left with a sense of being lectured at rather than listening to a real person in the process of moving towards an understanding of the nature of an object. This is lazy dialogue-writing both in terms of interaction structure and the language of the interaction. Within the space of thirteen lines on the page (original Penguin edn) the same gambits are repeated using very similar vocabulary: Travers indicates an object and the General responds. For the first object we have:


The General ran his glass over it. ‘Doesn’t look like…’ while for the second we have: Wharton ran his glass over it, frowned at it and gave it back. ‘Looks like…’ Unlike the extract from Orwell, there is little sense of these parallel interactions providing a satisfying balance, or being manipulated by the writer for stylistic effects to give some insight into character. Rather they seem stale repetitions serving only to convey details for purposes of plot. This conclusion is supported by an extract later in the book, when Wharton is again examining the evidence, and again holding the floor with a similar effect: Sample 9

‘I must ask that maid in the morning if her mistress had a fountain pen like this. By the way, you’d have thought that anyone who trod on it would have known it and picked the pieces up. Just look here a minute.’ The two went over. Wharton explained. ‘Looks a certainty that Ward trod on it. See the softness of the carpet, and the thickness of this knobbly bit at the end of the pen?…’ (TQ Chapter 5) Summary The structure of literary exchanges is unlike spontaneous interaction as seen in transcription. Spontaneous interaction is as much to do with sustaining and monitoring the process of communication as it is with conveying ideas, opinions or information. As such, it shows evidence of these pragmatic concerns. The hesitations, overlaps and interruptions which often help to carry forward a satisfactory conversation as speakers accommodate their utterances to those of others are manifestations of the process of communication. In a literary context, these interpersonally generated features are not the primary concern, rather the dialogue seeks to convey information needed to carry forward the plot and/or relate significant interactions to broader themes in the work as a whole. There is also a contrast between the dynamic forces which shape real interaction and allow speakers to become joint creators of contributions to a conversation and the independent utterances of distinct characters usually found in literary settings. Ironically, actual speakers in transcripts of real interactions have potentially less individuality in terms of being the sole creator of a contribution to the discourse than the shades we find in literary contexts (Chapter 3 deals with this further).


The process of looking at dialogue in literary texts and contrasting them with actual interactions can give some insight into why certain writers appear to be able to make a reader suspend disbelief and feel that real speech is in progress while others waste the potential of direct speech and leave us with something stale and lacking in vitality. While a writer might not wish to present all the banal and often repetitive or verbose utterances we use to sustain and monitor dialogue, the less successful examples shown above suggest that the total removal of interactive features is not advisable. Literary exchanges showing features of spontaneous conversation This section follows a rather more sustained interaction between two characters, and focuses particularly on the contrast between the presentation of troubled and untroubled interaction. There are a variety of techniques at the disposal of a writer to indicate confusion, embarrassment or anger within a dialogue, but these techniques exist within fairly clear parameters of reader expectation. Prose writers may experiment with breaking through these conventions, and readers can quickly accommodate themselves to idiosyncratic representations of speech once they realise the new ‘rules’ which the writer has adopted, but, in general, reader-friendliness wins the day. As was suggested in the previous section, the interactions we find in books are not like real interactions in many ways, primarily because they are artefacts presented in a constructed context. This does not mean that typical features of interaction—overlaps, hesitations or interruptions—are never shown in literary exchanges, but rather these features take on a different significance on the page. The following example from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry shows how the presentation of these features can be manipulated for literary effect. While out on a riding trip, two characters, a woman and a man, stop for a drink, and see a little girl playing with an armadillo. The woman, Yvonne, asks the girl how much she wants for the animal, and a joking, smoothly running conversation ensues between her and her companion, Hugh. Sample 10

‘You don’t really want it, do you?’ […] Yvonne nodded in jest: ‘I’d adore it. It’s perfectly sweet.’ ‘You couldn’t make a pet of it. Neither can the kid: that’s why she wants to sell it.’ Hugh sipped his beer. ‘I know all about armadillos.’ ‘Oh so do I!’ Yvonne shook her head mockingly, opening her eyes very wide. ‘But everything!’ (UV Chapter 4)


Here we have a ‘classic’ A-B-A-B interaction, with no hint in the presentation of overlaps, interruption or usual production errors such as false starts. The impression on the page is one of smooth running banter. However, the joking soon stops, when an allusion by Hugh to the armadillo’s sinister propensities (‘…if you try to stop it [disappearing into a tunnel it has dug] it will do its damnedest to pull you down the hole too’) seems to remind them of the destructive tendencies of Yvonne’s ex-husband and Hugh’s brother, who is called Geoff. The conversation then moves on to more sensitive issues. Hugh, who has had an affair with Yvonne in the past, asks her whether she has really divorced Geoff and she replies: Sample 11

‘Oh, I’ve—divorced him,’ she answered unhappily. ‘But you don’t know whether you’ve gone back to him or not?’ ‘Yes. No… Yes. I’ve gone back to him all right all right.’ (UV Chapter 4) Here the sensitivity of the issue, and Yvonne’s ambivalent attitude to her exhusband are indicated by the breaking up of her previously slick responses. Firstly there is the pause, suggested by the dash (‘Oh, I’ve—divorced him’) as if she is loath to use the word ‘divorced’. Secondly there is the contradictory ‘Yes. No’, and the second pause, indicated by the ellipsis marks, before she concludes: ‘Yes. I’ve gone back to him’, ending with the (again ambiguous) repetition of ‘all right’. In this example we see something akin to the process by which actual speakers grope for the best way to express their meaning (for example the ‘No I don’t play very much now, no, not at all’ of Sample 4, or the ‘and there was another bit as well another dangly bit’ from Sample 5). However, in the context of a crafted literary dialogue, this not unusual process in real speech becomes a code to act as a signal of emotion or mental disturbance for the reader. The ‘difficult’ interaction continues with Hugh offering to go away earlier than he had planned to ease the situation: Sample 12

‘…I’d been thinking of going to Oaxaca for a day or two anyhow —’ Yvonne had raised her head at the word Oaxaca. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it might [make things simpler for her]. Though, oh Hugh, I don’t like to say it, only —’ ‘Only what?’ ‘Only please don’t go away till we’ve talked it over. I’m so frightened.’ (UV Chapter 4)


Here interruptions are indicated, as well as broken off utterances (‘anyhow —’ and ‘only—’) as Yvonne appears to leap eagerly at his suggestion then pause before admitting that she is frightened. Back to banality The surprising thing is that we do not learn the cause of her fear, because the interaction is not sustained as we might expect. By the end of the last exchange, given above, Hugh is, somewhat unexpectedly, paying for the beers and thinking about the armadillo, rather than hanging on her every word. He does not respond to her confession of fear, and the conversation quickly moves on to banalities with Yvonne showing her local knowledge by explaining about bus routes, the history of the local town of Parián, and the development of the railway line. These ensuing conventional exchanges show little or no evidence of disfluencies. And, despite the fact that they subsequently return to the topic of Geoffs selfdestructive drinking, this superficial interlude, together with Hugh’s apparent inability to sustain a ‘deep’ conversation, hint at the futility, in general, of their attempts at constructive communication. Summary There are a variety of ways for a writer to show heightened emotional states during interaction between characters. However, the literary exchange tends to reserve the representation of normal disfluency features as a signal for readers of emotional tension. Since readers are ‘trained’ to decode the representation of disfluency features as being indicative of a problematic or heightened emotional state between speakers, the preparation of verbatim transcripts of spoken interactions for purposes other than academic analysis (for example, in the context of the police interview) becomes an issue. The next section deals with the topic of interactions written down by means of a case-study. This discusses the treatment of interactions in parliamentary discourse as spoken by Members of Parliament and as subsequently transcribed for a written record in the Official Report (‘Hansard’). A CASE-STUDY: PARLIAMENTARY INTERACTIONS So far in this chapter, we have looked at some examples of spontaneous interactions, and some literary exchanges. These have in common the fact that the transcripts of the actual interchanges, and the fictional extracts all share a common root, as it were, being generally informal, and from the domain of conversation. Speakers in more formal settings usually have to adhere to more explicit conventions for utterance. Discourse produced in the setting of


Parliament is, at first sight, some of the least conversational, and in some cases most arcane, of any in English. Therefore, this discourse is unlike the interactions we have been looking at so far: it is spoken with a large present audience, it is spoken with a wider public audience of voting constituents in mind, it follows the conventions of debate and thus has explicit rules of linguistic and physical behaviour (all speakers must speak through The Speaker, all speakers have to stand while they are giving their contribution, speakers wishing to interrupt another need to be given way to by a speaker who is holding the floor, and so on). However, within this formalised framework there is opportunity for informal and unofficial asides and interchanges; and in a broader sense, similar issues to those raised by the representation of interaction in literary settings can be seen. The following case-study is based on a parliamentary debate about televising the House of Commons. There are three versions of this debate relevant to this chapter. The first is a verbatim transcript from sound recordings of the discourse (Text S); the second is the Official Report (‘Hansard’), version prepared by official transcribers at the House (Text W). The third version is the same as Text S, but with all disfluencies (repetitions, hesitations and so on) eliminated (Text Sl). The preliminary findings of the case-study showed that the volume of discourse is significantly reduced when spoken language is transferred to the page. The word (or more technically ‘token’) total went down by just over 17 per cent for the debate in question. Translated into other terms the significance of the drop was calculated to be equivalent to around forty-five minutes of speech ‘gone missing’ or, in other words, the average contribution of three speakers to a debate. This section shows subsequent work based on the hypothesis that this reduction will not be constant across all categories of discourse. That is to say, that some types of language would show a greater reduction than others. Furthermore, in connection with the conclusions from the previous discussions in the present chapter, we might also predict that language with the primary purpose of sustaining discourse will not survive in transcription, and neither would language showing disfluencies. Categorising the sections of discourse For the analysis the discourse was broken up into different discourse categories. These were based on the conventions governing discourse in the debating chamber, such as the fact that all contributions to the debate have to be acknowledged by the person in charge of the debate (‘The Speaker’), just as contributions during a committee meeting have to go through the ‘Chair’. As in most cases where this convention is supposed to hold sway, the system frequently breaks down as contributors feel moved to speak, and to ignore the person who is nominally in charge. Nevertheless, all discourse during a


parliamentary debate is shaped by the rules governing behaviour, and sections of speakers’ language can be defined in relation to this framework. The following are the categories which were used in the study: • ‘Discourse category’: Discourse section serving functional purpose and/or distinct from surrounding discourse with respect to function, topic, acceptability under rules governing debate in Commons. Those used in this survey are: • ‘Main’: Speech of a main speaker called through The Speaker to participate in debate at a given time and which is not covered by the following categories. • ‘Intervention’: Speech of a secondary speaker interrupting a main speaker through the Chair. • ‘Response’: Speech of a main speaker responding to intervention. • ‘Organisation’: Speech serving to maintain discourse between speakers. • ‘Unofficial’: Speech not covered by any of the above categories. • ‘Speaker section’: Unit of debate throughout which a ‘Main’ speaker (see above) holds floor. Sample of discourse categories in transcription Initially, it may be helpful to show pairs of texts from Text S and Text W, both to give examples of the categories and to show, for small sections of debate, how the reductions occur. The following samples of the texts showing the alteration and elimination of discourse categories: Sample 13 Text S

Comment

[Intervention—Speaker 1] does he not think in his judgement that had the Select Committee on Westland been televised the Right Honourable Gentleman the Member for Richmond would have then been in a position where he had to answer possibly greatly for that Right Honourable Gentleman’s own good [Organisation—Speaker 2] Mr Wallace

Speaker 1 has been allowed to ‘break-in’ to the discourse of the original speaker who was holding the floor

[Response—Speaker 3] I think it is a matter of speculation but I think he either would have had to answer or failure to answer would perhaps have attracted more public er comment and judgement than it necessarily did er without it it being televised but the I think I think

Speaker 2 (the Deputy Speaker), acknowledges the return of the original speaker Speaker 3, the original speaker responds to the intervention


Text S

Comment

[Organisation—Speaker 3] I’ve given away I’ve given way quite a number of times and I want I’ve given away a number of times and I would like to move on to some of the reservations which er we do have er Madam er Madam Deputy Speaker [Main—Speaker 3] because we do think that there W-that there could well be er the dangers of exclusion and unfair coverage not only of those of us on this bench but of the the nationalist parties the parties from Northern

The original speaker re-embarks on the thread of his discourse which was broken off by the successful intervention

Ireland and indeed from backbenchers from er from all parties after all at the last general election nearly a a quarter of the el- of those who voted er voted for a third force in British politics but the procedures of this House are very much geared to a two-party system indeed at the on the occasion when we last debated this in November 1985 Hugo Young writing in the Guardian said… [Unofficial—Speaker 4] who’s he

The original speaker re-embarks on the thread of his discourse which was broken off by the successful intervention

facetious comment by another Member, not recognised by The Speaker and therefore ‘unofficial’

(Author’s data) Sample 13a Text W

Comment

[Intervention—Speaker 1] Does the Honourable Gentleman not think that had the Westland Select Committee been televised the Right Honourable and Learned Member for Richmond Yorks. would have had to answer, possibly very much for his own good? [Response—Speaker 3] That is a matter for speculation. Either he would have had to answer, or failure to answer would perhaps have attracted more public comment and judgement than occurred without its being televised. (Campbell Savours rose)

Intervention as above in Text S version, with alterations typical of the Hansard text

Note that the organisational utterance of Speaker 2 above is not transcribed, and the presence of an explanatory ‘stage direction’ for the reader re the Member who is trying to intervene


Text W

Comment

[Organisation—Speaker 3] I have given way a number of times. I should like now to move on to some of our reservations on this matter.

Reduced version of the Text S move to return to main topic without the repetitions and mistakes caused by the fending off of another speaker

[Main—Speaker 3] We feel that there could be a danger of exclusion or unfair coverage—not only of Alliance members, but of the nationalist parties, the parties from Northern Ireland and backbenchers from all parties. After all, nearly a quarter of those who voted at the last General Election voted for the third force in British politics, but the procedures of the House are very much geared to a two-party system. When we last debated this matter, in November 1985, Mr Hugo Young, writing in the Guardian, said that he thought…

The speaker returns to his main train of thought, as in the spoken version, but the unofficial remarks made by others are not transcribed

(OR) Preliminary findings The most striking thing about the ‘verbatim’ transcript prepared as the official record of discourse in the Commons is that some utterances have disappeared completely, or been greatly reduced. Table 2.1 gives a diagrammatic representation of the difference in categories in these extracts. Table 2.1 Elimination of discourse categories in transcription

Quite apart from any alterations or omissions made within discourse categories as the transcriber tidies and corrects utterances, the Hansard version omits whole stages that were present in the original: for example the first occurrence of organisational talk (the acknowledgment by the Deputy Speaker of whose turn it is to speak next—in this case, a Main speaker who is responding to an intervention, having given way previously and the final, ‘unofficial’ utterance in the transcript). This hints at two major criteria we might think of transcribers


(those in ‘natural’ settings, as opposed to the linguist preparing a transcription for analysis) as using when they decide what should not be included on the page: first, sections of talk which simply exist to carry forward the mechanics of the discourse itself; second, utterances that are not in line with the conventions of the framework of the discourse, the ‘rules’ governing the interactions. Further analysis With the aid of a computer this intuition about the regular reduction or complete removal of certain types of discourse in transcription can be tested, and this can give some insight into what transcribers feel readers should have in front of them on the page to read as an acceptable record of a person’s speech. Token counts by discourse category suggest that the process seen in the short extracts above is part of a more general feature of the transcription. For the whole debate the sections of discourse in Text S and Text W were analysed and marked off from one another in such a way that a computer concordance programme4 could recognise them and count the word totals for any given section in isolation from the others. To exemplify this, in the small extract given above the computer could be programmed to prepare a token total for, say, the Organisation category in Text S and the total would be around forty-six (depending on whether you had decided to count the auxiliary verb ‘have’ as a separate word when elided as in ‘I’ve’). A similar instruction to count the same category in Text W would give a total of twenty-two. For any small section of Text S and the equivalent in Text W this reduction by over a half might not be significant—it could be a strange section of text with an unusually high reduction —but a count made for the whole debate shows a similar process of reduction at work. The totals for all the discourse categories are shown in Table 2.2. The first three categories listed there show reductions in token totals close to the average for speakers in the debate. As was predicted from the analysis of a small sample of text, the last two categories, ‘Organisation’ and ‘Unofficial’ have undergone reductions of well over twice this average. Table 2.2 Discourse categories ranked by token totals

Before drawing any sweeping conclusions about these figures, it is important to consider how much of the talk that has ‘gone missing’ is attributable to


disfluency features such as hesitations, repetitions and voiced fillers, features which, as was noted above, writers associate with a ‘difficult’ interaction. That is to say, it might not be seen as very significant if transcribers merely eliminate the features which are production errors, but, in contrast, it may be seen as more significant if whole sections of ‘correct’ discourse are being eliminated. Analysis taking into account speaker error A second count using a different version of the spoken text (Text Sl) for a comparison with Text W was carried out. This text marked production errors as to be ignored by the computer. For example, in the short extract given above the words that are in italics would have been omitted from the count: because we do think that there w- that there could well be er the dangers of exclusion and unfair coverage The ‘w-’ was possibly a false start of the word ‘well’ (was the speaker going to use the more emphatic word-order of ‘well could be’ as opposed to ‘could well be’?). This is followed by a repetition of ‘that there’ as he reformulates the utterance, and the clause continues with a voiced filler ‘er’ before the complement of the verb ‘be’ is constructed and uttered. As will be seen in Chapter 3 some individuals appear to have much more difficulty in choosing words and formulating utterances than others, and the transcriber sees his/her job to be to convey the final form reached by the speaker, rather than the sometimes groping process by which the form is found. If all the disappearing words from the markedly reduced sections of discourse (Unofficial and Organisation) can be attributed to disfluency features, then it would not be possible to really claim that these sections were undergoing anything different from other sections of discourse. That is to say, they were not reduced because of their status, but because they contained a great many production errors. We might be interested to think why these sections of discourse had such a high prevalence of ‘errors’, but we could not conclude that transcribers were eliminating the categories per se. The results of the token count between the ‘error-free’ text (Text Sl) and the Hansard version (Text W) are shown in Table 2.3. The high degree of token reduction in the discourse categories mentioned above is maintained between Text Sl and Text W. That is to say, over half the category ‘Unofficial’ and nearly half of the category ‘Organisation’ present in Text Sl were ‘missing’ from Text W in terms of volume of tokens, just as they had been when Text W was compared to Text S. The implication of this is that we are witnessing a reduction in terms of actual ‘content’ words (used loosely here rather than in the way the term is used in lexical studies), rather than repetitions or hesitations from these categories of discourse. This conclusion was further supported when a count was made to


show what proportion of the difference between Text S and Text W that could be accounted for by error. As Table 2.4 shows, the discourse categories that had ranked highest in terms of overall token loss ranked lowest in terms of the percentage of overall differences due to ‘errors’. Indeed, in the ‘Unofficial’ category there were no such ‘errors’ of speech production present and therefore no part of the missing percentage of tokens could be accounted for by these factors. The top category in Table 2.4 was ‘Response’ with 36 per cent of the difference in volume between Text S and Text W accounted for by speaker ‘error’. Table 2.3 Token fall between Text S1 and Text W by discourse category ranked according to difference as percentage of Text S1

Table 2.4 Discourse categories ranked according to percentage of differences between Text S and Text W accounted for by speaker error

It is tempting to draw conclusions from these figures. For example, one intuitively feels that speaker ‘error’ will be increased after an intervention by another speaker. The high incidence of hesitancy and repetition in the discourse category ‘Response’, where the speakers are dealing with such an interruption, would appear to support this. The figures presented in Table 2.4 could be interpreted as reflecting the nature and priorities of the kind of record-taking under consideration. That is to say the written record aims to capture facts and not the dynamics of discourse. One might therefore expect the discourse categories containing the interplay of speakers as they organise their turn-taking, for example, not to be retained, and a comparison of the texts in question would appear to support this. Summary These results suggest that transcribers, like creative writers, are not concerned to show readers a record of the actual process of spoken communication. The study of parliamentary discourse has also thrown up the issue of ‘correctness’, for


example, the fact that only discourse that is recognised by the person in charge of the debate should be given space. In general, the process of representing an interaction on the page is focused on the content of the utterances more than on the way in which this content was conveyed. This is true of the literary as well as non-literary representations of spoken exchanges, where the interests of the reader tend to outweigh veracity and/or verbatimness of transcription. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION When writers seek to represent a spoken interaction on the page, they face an initial problem in that they are transferring what is dynamic, primarily oral/aural, interpersonally motivated and strongly temporally dependent to a medium illsuited to showing these distinctive features. Conventions have arisen which signal to a reader that spoken interaction is taking place, and writers can choose to flout or adopt these as they feel the need. This is a fruitful area of study for students interested in the more linguistic side of literary studies; for example, a comparison can be undertaken of different writers’ techniques in representing spoken interaction, and the degree to which standard conventions are adopted. A second issue is the degree to which literary ‘constructed’ interactions seek to reflect spontaneous interaction. This is an issue with two sub-points. First, there is the fact that writers, and we may be thankful for this, are generally not linguists, and, unless they have made a study of the topic, have only a layperson’s knowledge of the structure of real spoken data. Second, there is the related point that readers are trained in the normal conventions of speech presentation, and they too have only a ‘residual’ picture of the complexities of interaction. Therefore, when a writer makes an effort to present something more akin to realistic speech between characters this often has an alienating effect. That is to say, the reader does not recognise the written-down-speech style of writing as an accurate reflection of their perception of spoken interaction, or may simply be turned off by the unconventional look of the writing on the page, or they may misinterpret the cues as being indicative of a ‘problematic’ exchange between characters. Again, not all literary works are alike in this respect, and an interesting point of comparison between writers, or between different works by the same writer, is the degree to which the spoken discourse comes near to actual interaction. As touched on previously, a great deal of real spoken interaction is boring in the extreme, and even meaningless, to those not involved. The task for the writer is to manipulate those features which help readers to recognise spoken interaction, while avoiding the extremes of difficult to read and ambiguous to interpret vérité, or unrealistic woodenness. In non-literary contexts, such as the transcription of police interviews, the issue of verbatimness takes on even greater significance. Here, once again, if there is not to be a re-education of readers into new conventions for showing


actual speech written down, so that the hesitant or apparently less than articulate speaker does not automatically seem over-emotional or shifty to a reader, the balance must be struck between capturing what was actually said and misrepresenting the speaker in the new channel by a too faithful transcript. EXERCISES Task:

Look again at the transcript you made of a conversation for the first task at the end of Chapter 1. Does this show features of a smoothly running conversation or not? Could it be included, unedited, in a novel? If not, why not? List the features which would make it difficult for readers of a novel to understand. Task:

Find some short extracts of dialogue from your favourite novelist. To what extent does s/he attempt to show features of actual spontaneous conversation? Task:

Look at the following representation of an angry interchange between a father and son (taken from a Sherlock Holmes story). In the light of this chapter, how does the writer show heightened emotion? Do you think an actual angry exchange would be structured like this? (Here the speaker is quoting himself.) Sample 14

“‘You blackguard!” I shouted, beside myself with rage. “You have destroyed it! You have dishonoured me forever! Where are the jewels you have stolen?” “Stolen!” he cried. “Yes, you thief!” I roared, shaking him by the shoulder. “There are none missing. There cannot be any missing,” said he. “There are three missing. And you know where they are. Must I call you a liar as well as a thief? Did I not see you trying to tear off another piece?”’ (BC) Task: In your reading, look out for examples of exchanges which match any of the interactions you have read about in this chapter and create a ‘portfolio’ of exchanges; for example, two people catching up with one another’s experiences, or two people assessing an object that is present in their situation. What is the balance of contributions made by each speaker? Do your examples support the


conclusions of this chapter? If not, how would you alter some of the conclusions? FURTHER READING Burton, Deirdre (1980) Dialogue and Discourse, London: Routledge. Button, Graham and Lee, John R.E. (eds) (1987) Talk and Social Organisation, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Coulthard, M (1985) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, London: Longman. Nunan, D. (1993) Introducing Discourse Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Orestrom, B. (1983) Turn-taking in English Conversation, Malmo: Liber.

Chapter 3 Individuals in speech and writing

In every human utterance lies the sum total of that person’s linguistic past. INTRODUCTION The discussion in this chapter begins with a general overview of the notion of distinctively individual use of language (one’s idiolect), first in the spoken channel, and then in the written. It then moves on to consider real speakers and fictional speakers,1 and concludes with a second case-study investigating how and why some speakers’ idiolects seem to be more amenable to transcription for a written record than others. In the same novel from which the epigraph for this chapter is taken (Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg) a useful example to highlight the key concepts underlying the present discussion can be found. The central character, Smilla, has found a cassette tape recording of a person speaking. Although she herself is a Greenlander by origin, she cannot understand the dialect which is being spoken and she takes the tape to a language expert for analysis: Sample 15

He listens for half a minute with his head in his hands. Then he stops the tape. ‘Mid-forties. Grew up near Ammassalik. Very little formal education. On top of the East Greenlandic there are traces of more northern dialects. But up there they move around too much to say which exactly. He has probably never been away from Greenland for any significant period of time.’ (MSFS Chapter 3) The language expert, like that famous earlier example, Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, is able to disentangle and articulate the features in the sample he has heard which make the unknown speaker distinctive. Whereas most of us are only able to recognise the ‘sum total’ in what we hear, and gain an impressionistic sense of the individuality of the language, the expert can break

64 INDIVIDUALS IN SPEECH AND WRITING

down the individual elements into geographical elements (for example ‘Grew up near Ammassalik’), and sociological elements (mid-forties, very little formal education), the combination of which produces the speaker’s idiolect. Additionally, in any sample of speech there are incidental elements which may have an influence on any individual utterance, such as topic, setting or interlocutor. The expert continues, moving on to these types of feature (he also locates another sociological element: the speaker’s probable occupation): Sample 16

He’s describing a journey. Across ice. With sleighs pulled by rope. Well, yes — and dogs. He’s probably a hunter, because he uses a series of technical terms, such as anut for the dog harnesses. He’s probably talking to a European. He uses English names for locations. And he seems to think he has to repeat many things. (MSFS Chapter 3) Factors which influence idiolect The factors which go towards making up our identifiable speech patterns can be divided2 according to the categories shown in Table 3.1. Table 3.1 Divisions of idiolect

The divisions shown in Table 3.1 provide a checklist of factors to consider when we discuss idiolect, and a series of points of comparison when we turn next to the matter of writing and idiolect.

INDIVIDUALS IN SPEECH AND WRITING 65

Individual voices The way in which one speaks is akin to a fingerprint. The single word ‘hello’ spoken on the telephone is usually sufficient for a listener to recognise the speaker, even if they have only a slight acquaintance. This unique vocal ‘fingerprint’ is made up of several interlocking aspects. The first of these is the dialect or dialects we speak. Traditionally, this concept is strongly linked to the physical location of a community of speakers who all tend to speak in the same way, and to show social solidarity to those around them by choosing to sound like their family or neighbours. Choosing whether or not to retain a way of speaking which marks you out as from a particular area (and more subtly, from a social group that is stereotypically linked with speakers of that dialect) is a central way of defining one’s identity as one grows up and becomes a more conscious language user. The dialect that one speaks will initially be affected most strongly by that of one’s parents, by early peer groups, areas of long-term settlement, such as when one moves to a new location to take up a job and remains there for several years, and it continues to be affected throughout life by the process of communication with those whom we find influential in our lives: life partners, and social groups of other adults we admire and wish to be accepted by. Cross-cutting the dialectal factors are sociological factors which again assist the individual to mark their identity in relation to others. We may choose to speak in one style or another because of a particular context, such as a job interview, but underpinning this is the ‘default’ way we speak, our usual voice in which we speak most of the time. The position of a family in society, the choice of schooling, the type of work a person undertakes, and again the influence of the group(s) of people we want to be a part of are all social factors which leave their mark on the way a person speaks. Some of the characteristics of an individual’s speech, such as voice quality and pitch, are retained whether one is speaking one’s mother tongue or not and are determined by the physical characteristics of the body, the length of vocal chords and so on. Others, such as accent, intonation or speed, are more within the control of the individual, and are less physically dependent. One’s age, state of health and constitution and the presence or absence of physical impediments all affect and help to define one’s individual way of speaking. The above combine with incidental features such as who one is speaking to at the time, the type of discourse being constructed (for example, conversation or a public after-dinner speech), the emotional states, the topic and the reason for speaking, and are factors which need to be considered when discussing whether a sample of language is ‘typical’ of the individual producing it. The term ‘idiolect’ is more usually used in relation to dialectal features, being coined to refer to the actual language used by an individual in a language community as opposed to the more abstract collection of individuals’ language patterns which go to make up the dialect. The focus in this discussion of


individuals’ language is less upon how an individual sounds and more upon preferred choice in lexis, typical syntactic structuring and so on. The reason for this is that while the production aspects of an individual’s discourse—their vocal pattern (or indeed their handwriting in the written channel)—may be the most distinctive aspects of the language sample, these aspects are the least useful in terms of comparison between speech and writing. The aim in this chapter is to analyse features which can be said to hold identity across channel: words, phrases and clauses, rather than less directly comparable features such as intonational patterns of an individual speaker and, say, punctuation. A further reason for putting the focus on content features rather than production ones is that these have more bearing on the representation of character through speech in literary contexts, and this topic permits an interesting four-way comparison to be made concerning: the individual speaker, the individual writer, representation of a fictional individual’s speech, representation of a real individual’s speech. Individual language use and writing So far the discussion has dealt primarily with the spoken form of language, even if only implicitly. When we turn to consider the written form, we are faced once again with a lack of symmetry between the two forms, and an associated difficulty in any comparison. Speech is the locus of change in a language. The engine which drives that change is the sum of everyone’s idiolects. As we choose to speak in one way or another we affect the choices made by others and gradually, as one form seems right, useful or amusing, or another seems wrong, ineffective or boring, the spoken language reshapes itself. After a period of time a change may be given a seal of approval and enter the respectable world of the standard written form,3 in the case of a neologism it will find itself in a dictionary, in the case of a grammatical variant (and this is a much harder journey for a linguistic item) it will find itself as a footnote in a book on ‘correct’ grammatical usage. A writer may choose to flout the norms of the mode, and indeed unmediated writing (i.e. writing which is not published and edited in a formal context, but rather written directly for consumption by one individual from another, such as an informal letter between friends) often uses forms which would not generally be recognised by the ‘gatekeepers’ of writing as acceptable. Therefore, whereas an individual speaker can hardly choose but reveal something of their distinctive idiolect each time they open their mouth to speak, an individual communicating in the written channel, particularly through a printed or published medium, has the potential to remain far more anonymous. Indeed, as will be shown below, the skilful writer must learn to work within the conventions and restrictions of the visual channel and this is a process which involves adopting standard spelling, punctuation, grammar and the norms of information presentation associated with written genres.


While it can be argued that a speaker must also work within conventions and expectations, these tend not to be articulated in the same way, or as explicitly, as those which govern language production through writing. Furthermore, speech conventions tend to be ‘acquired’ rather than taught. The nature of writing means that it is easier to examine, in all senses of the word, and easier to set evaluative criteria for. In a literate society, writing serves well-defined functions, such as being the medium for contractual agreements, for information gathering and storage, or other interactions based around content which people demand should persist through time. These functions are by their very nature social, rather than individual, and tend to permit little variation between different producers. Additionally, it is the hallmark of ‘socially defined’ writing, such as legal documents, or laboratory reports, that they are ‘impersonal’, and the valorising of objectivity in scientific or institutional texts assists the process of reducing individuality in much that is produced via the written channel. A person’s individuality is, therefore, often masked or altered by using the written channel and this fact can make the status of idiolect in writing problematic. The above points lead to a difficulty in defining idiolect in writing, and a difficulty in comparing idiolect across channel. This point will be considered further in a discussion of young writers, but first, we return to the categories given above which were seen as underpinning spoken idiolect, and attempt to analyse discourse produced by an individual solely in the written channel, in order to flesh out some more details of the asymmetries between speech and writing. The first category seen as underlying idiolect was dialectal. Historical factors have led to written English being closely associated with Standard English, itself a development of Southern English dialects and strongly influenced by the geographical location of centres of power and learning such as London, Oxford and Cambridge. The refinement of printing and publishing techniques has led to further standardisation of spelling and punctuation (a relatively recent development) so that the relationship between variations in geographical location and idiosyncrasies of writing has been broken. These developments are not without good reason. Since the written form of language has developed to serve the purpose of communicating across time and space with other individuals, it is generally not efficient or advisable to limit the possibility of being read and understood because of geographically dependent features, such as dialect words for objects, or a spelling which seeks to convey a regional accent. The writer who unwittingly reveals dialectal origins in the written channel is likely to be regarded as ill-educated. On the other hand, writers who knowingly try to convey dialectal features in the written mode, for example D.H.Lawrence or Emily Brontë, rarely do so without some desire for contrast effect between the dialectal and the standard forms, and an associated insight into character. Therefore, for the majority of people communicating through writing, dialect features which may be an


important part of a person’s identity, and which serve to show solidarity with a particular location and/or community, need to be subsumed if one is to be accepted as a skilled writer. Only when this level of standardisation has been reached can dialectal features be re-assimilated, in which case they can serve to show evidence of an even more highly regarded skill, that of the creative writer. This process can be seen in terms of three levels of awareness or competence, a point which will be returned to below. For example, if a writer always uses the word ‘mardy’ to mean ill-tempered simply because this is a part of their speech idiolect and they are transferring this directly in to the written channel and it is the first word that comes to mind, they have failed to grasp two key aspects of written mode: first, that it requires deliberation; second, that, as in speech, different contexts require different language. If, however, they use ‘mardy’ in a letter to their close school friend and not in an English language examination, they show the minimum level of awareness needed, and have begun the process of distinguishing between speech and writing. Finally, if the word is used by a creative writer and put into the mouth of a character, a high level of sophistication has been reached, since the speech habits of a fictional creation (and a fictional idiolect) are being conveyed through the written channel in order to be decoded by a reader as indicative of social status of character, relation between characters, state of mind of character and so on. The analogy here might be that of the contrast between a person who simply dresses in whatever comes to hand with little sense of how it will be perceived, as opposed to the dresser with a sense of appropriateness, who in turn contrasts with a person whose job it is to convey something through the semiotics of clothing, such as a costume designer in film or theatre. The second category of idiolect features noted above was sociological. The dominance of a standardised form of written language which is acceptable in terms of spelling and grammar to those who produce, edit and publish the bulk of written material means that the sociological features affecting an individual writer, as was seen to be the case with dialect features, tend to boil down to what is acceptable in a standardised, formal form. The individual’s written idiolect is judged against a far more clearly articulated set of norms than their patterns of speech. Indeed, in some forms of writing, such as the business letter, the conventions have become so formulaic that software packages for the busy office can provide ready-made form letters for different kinds of communication objective. Rather than the capacity to communicate per se the competent writer must learn to manipulate acceptable linguistic forms within set perameters of the literate community. Within the collective limitations it is possible for the writer to have a style of their own, but as was suggested in the discussion of dialect, too great a deviation from what is generally accepted will not be effective or acceptable in a modern literate society. Furthermore, whereas spoken idiolect is largely unconscious, and in many respects beyond our control (for example, the timbre of our voice, or favourite phrases such as ‘you know’ which we barely notice


ourselves using until someone points them out to us), the process of writing is more deliberative and the choices made between different ways of putting something are generally more conscious. The physical aspects which were noted as typically affecting speech idiolect are most applicable to the handwritten medium. Thus far the discussion has largely focused on printed written discourse, but the handwritten form, depending as it does so intimately on the individual, is the closest parallel to the physical aspects of a ‘voiceprint’ of an individual speaker. Those who study the science of handwriting claim that not only gender, age and state of health can be inferred from a sample of handwritten text, but also mental characteristics. Nonetheless, for most of us the effects of reading handwritten texts are largely subjective, and our interest lies mostly in the content of what has been written. This contrasts with speech, where many of the meaning-bearing elements of the language are bound up with subtle variations in the way something is said. Finally, those features which were considered incidental or ancillary to a speaker’s idiolect, such as the setting in which the discourse is produced, can be seen as having a variable level of influence over a writer’s idiolect. Other than rather vacuous conclusions about handwritten texts produced under emotional stress, or in less than perfect physical conditions, such as on a moving train, the choices that an individual writer makes are strongly influenced by audience, communicative objective and topic. These features, which were seen as having temporary, or speech-event-dependent effects on spoken idiolect, actually define and limit the potential for idiolect to be shown in writing. That is to say, the skilful writer assesses which forms of language to use in the light of probable reader, current objective and topic, and consciously manipulates the forms used accordingly. In general, therefore, the written mode may be seen as ‘filtering out’ speech idiolect. The effect of this filter is most marked when communication is taking place via a strongly formulaic genre under the umbrella of the identity of an organisation or institution, such as a business letter, but even when a writer is communicating in a genre which has a potential for less conventionalised forms of language, the need to remain within reader expectation limits the variation which a writer’s language can show. Even writers who are keen to present a strongly marked speech idiolect via the written channel usually choose to convey this by means of a few, selective indications of speech behaviour, rather than alienate their readership by attempting to convey all the features which combine in actual speech to mark an individual’s speech out from that of others. One idiolect or two? So far, consideration has been given to idolect in speech and then in writing, but there remain difficult questions for further and more theoretical study, questions which a channel-based approach to language makes particularly salient. For example, the precise relationship between speech idiolect and written idiolect in


an individual; whether, given the conventions and rules which dominate the written form, the concept of idiolect is at all applicable in the written channel; whether, as people become competent writers, they develop a secondary idiolect, their own habits and style of writing, which marks them off from other text producers; whether judgements about idiolect should be value-free or evaluative in nature. This last point regarding evaluation becomes more of an issue when we consider the written form, since the major part of what is read is produced by individuals who have reached a high level of competence in the channel. Whereas the spoken form is constantly instantiated in various ways and with varying degrees of communicative success (and in forms which the written would not allow), the written tends to be filtered and monitored, both by individual writers and those with the power of editing the writing of others. Therefore, many of the unconscious choices which speakers make and which go towards creating typical patterns of speech, cannot be said to be relevant in the written channel. The following quotation from Norman Mailer gives some indication of the painful, and painstaking, process by which an individual searches for the right way of expressing an idea in writing, and also highlights the dislike which this particular writer has for the undeliberative communication which the spoken channel forces on him: I think an interview is truly an unhappy way to get it said, particularly for someone who speaks as poorly as I do… When I write, I am forever going over the words. ‘Now, the best road, that is the most agreeable, no, the most indigenous, say rather, the most comfortable to travel of all the roads to Burlington is, uh, that is, the road you are likely to find most agreeable, yes, the agreeable road…’ Authors in raw transcript can seem as bad on occasion as politicians. (Mailer 1982: v-vi) The development of an individual style in the written channel is a more explicit process than in the spoken, and one which is shaped by the educational process and the relative value which a society places on spoken and written forms. This fact complicates any direct comparison of idiolect across channel. In order to consider this problem further, I shall be using examples from the writing of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds whose language use is idiosyncratic.4 The fact that is of interest is that these are language users in their mid-teens, some of whom would be able to leave school the following year and attempt to get a job, and who had, presumably, developed their own spoken idiolects.5 The question is whether the samples are best described as showing an attempt to transfer this speech idiolect directly into the written channel, or whether they suggest a development of a secondary idiolect which will be the typical pattera for future writing.


If a writer chooses to express the two-word phrase ‘ignore me’ as ‘egnoreme’ or the word ‘irrelevant’ as ‘erilivent’, this would appear to be a directly phonetic attempt at spelling out the words as they would be said. Other examples taken from these mother-tongue English speakers are: ‘engurence’ (endurance); ‘stubed’ (stupid); ‘jovill’ (jovial), with these last three suggesting that the way in which someone chooses to present something in writing can on occasion give us a clue to how they would express themselves and/or perceive items in the spoken channel, a fact which can, sometimes, take on hilarious or creative twists: He talk a load of Tod’s waddle (codswallop) Strange phraseology or inappropriate use of speech idioms can also mark the developing writer: He is the bad end of the stick He speaks slumpish These young people are expressing themselves in the written channel, but have not yet fully assimilated the need to break the direct link with speech. Such examples may be taken as evidence of a unitary idiolect. That is to say, the language user has a largely one-mode view of language, and attempts to ‘write as he/she would speak’.6 The examples of idiosyncratic language in the written channel given above are marked at the level of word or phrase. The surrounding context gives sufficient indication of what was meant, although a word or expression is mis-spelled or misused. As such, the writers show a higher awareness of the requirements of the channel than the writer of the following example: Sample 17

Mr G and Mrs H was related with the royal family that they were above with the politics. So mrs H were so useful just for the sort of thing that what open things and so on. The sort of langage thats were spoken were something that are Italy or Germany because they thought that it was so bad they seemed to mange to speak like without expensive parasites. (anonymous GCSE candidate) This young writer has a fairly well developed grasp of the mechanical channel requirements of writing—apart from ‘mange’ for ‘manage’ and ‘langage’ for ‘language’ the spelling is correct and the punctuation, although minimal, is present. What marks it out, however, is the lack of awareness of specifically written mode requirements. That is to say, the text is akin to babbled speech and hints at a marked non-standard speech idiolect. The relevant features include: non-standard (although variable) use of the verb ‘be’: Mr G and Mrs H was related they were


mrs H were The sort of langage thats were Something that are it was and idiosyncratic use of prepositions: related with above with the politics speak like without expensive parasites and impressively random ‘that’—constructions which serve to mask the intended meaning: Mr G and Mrs H was related with the royal family that they were above with the politics. So mrs H were so useful just for the sort of thing that what open things and so on. The sort of langage thats were spoken were something that are Italy or Germany because they thought that it was so bad they seemed to mange to speak like without expensive parasites. For the purposes of this analysis, and as was noted earlier, the types of written idiolect are divided into three as shown in Figure 3.1 in order to try to combine descriptive and evaluative insights. In this model, any sample of a person’s writing is regarded as showing idiolectal properties. Below a certain level of competence the writing is markedly different from the accepted norms, and may be closely related to an individual’s speech patterns. A realisation of the different mode requirements of the two channels (binary mode) brings with it the capacity for the individual to develop their own written idiolect within the conventions of the channel. The adept writer learns to manipulate styles and structures, and— what is of particular interest in the present study—can as a creative writer show not only their own individualism in writing, but attempt to convey other people’s speech patterns in the written channel (multi-mode): a highly sophisticated interplay of channel and mode. A unitary mode may be further broken down as follows: 1 Marked by spoken channel features: egnoreme [ignore me]; erilivent [irrelevant]; stubed [stupid]; a house of air own [their own] He talk a load of Tod’s waddle You made a spectral [spectacle] of yourself


Figure 3.1 Development of mode awareness

Here, as was noted above, the visual presentation is strongly influenced by the way the spoken forms would be produced by the individual. 2 Marked by spoken mode features: He is the bad end of the stick He is the type of person who would jump into someone else’s skin to see life in their shoes He is being as it were ‘put under the hammer’ by Mr Y In this category the way of putting ideas is such that it would be more at home in spoken discourse, such as informal phraseology or idiomatic expressions. 3 Marked by misuse of written channel features: He is very perlight And they do not have blue blood, has the saying goe’s. If thay did they would not be human. (comment on the royal family)


Here the idiosyncrasies arise because of a misunderstanding of, and an overeagerness to use, features which are grounded in the written channel, such as silent letters or the apostrophe to mark possessive forms. 4 Marked by misuse of written mode features: they seemed to manage to speak like without expensive parasites In this example, the words ‘expensive parasites’ belong to a higher level of formality than the surrounding discourse (and, indeed, were ‘lifted’ from the text on which the student was writing a commentary). A purely descriptive definition of idiolect would allow us to say that writing which diverges from the norm is an example of individual writing style. We might say that the person’s written idiolect has properties X and Y (for example, non-standard use of prepositions) and we may conclude that these are a reflection of a transference of some speech idiolect features into the written channel. However, a developmental, or evaluative model would suggest that the writer needed help in order to be able to express themselves in this channel and to develop a binary idiolect able to manipulate both channel and mode features appropriately. Whereas in speech there is a strong tradition among linguists for evaluation-free description of language which allows us to say that whatever variation we find in a person’s language is potentially a marker of their idiolect (whether this variation is standard or highly non-standard), a tension arises for the concept when it is applied to written discourse due to the more overtly standardised nature of the form as represented in the bulk of texts in the channel (i.e. printed, published, edited and corrected). Summary This consideration of idiolect in speech and writing has brought out some of the difficulties which underlie a comparison of two such different forms of language. Whereas an individual speaker, whatever the context they are speaking in, will show at least some of the ‘core’ features of their idiolect (preferred intonational patterns, lexical choice, and so on) whenever they speak, the individual writer, who must adopt shared and conventionalised forms in order to gain acceptance, must learn to mask their idiolect in many contexts. The complexities are further increased when consideration is given to the differing media in which the written form of language can appear — handwriting, typescript, computer screen, book, public notice, advertising billboard, and so on, and the level of personal control, and authorship, which the text producer has over the discourse written in these different contexts. Nonetheless, what has come out of this discussion is the underlying fact that successful writers need to develop a sensitivity to appropriateness without the more obvious situational and interpersonal cues which are available to the speaker, and that a fundamental


stage in this process is learning that one’s spoken idiolect may not be adequate or comprehensible in the visual medium. For reasons touched on in Chapter 2, the written form tends not to attempt to convey interpersonal or organisational features of speech, and whereas much of what goes on during spoken interactions is taken up with maintaining the discourse, a written representation of interaction tends only to attempt to show the mechanics of discourse as a signal to the reader of a problematic interaction. Equally, if we consider the individual writer, as opposed to speaker, there is a tendency to emphasise informational content over the interpersonal, and evidence of a conventionally delimited set of choices for the language producer. The process of developing an idiolect for writing is one of learning to separate form and content and acquiring the skill of deliberative language choice. In the following sections some real speakers’ language is considered in the light of the previous discussion on idiolect. There then follows a brief look at the way individuals are represented by writers in literary contexts, before the final part of the chapter goes on to look at real speakers transcribed in non-literary contexts. As in Chapter 2, the underlying assumption is that skilled writers manipulate the presentation of speech events (in this case, the speech of an individual, rather than an interaction) and that the ways in which they choose to represent speech can tell us something fundamental about the differences between the two forms of language. REAL VERSUS FICTIONAL INDIVIDUALS SPEAKING Real individual speakers If we consider Sample 18 and Sample 19 some of the difficulties for a creative writer who wants to represent idiolect become apparent. This is because when transcripts of actual speakers are read, they often contain very few ‘cues’ as to the personality of the speaker. In order to test this, questions we might ask about the two short samples which follow are: • • • • •

How old are these speakers? Are both samples from the same speaker at different times? Are the speaker(s) male or female? What part of the country are they from? Are they highly educated or not?

Creative writers, if they are not simply to rely on their authorial comments, but rather want the characters to sound right and ‘in character’, need to convey this type of information. And frequently they need to convey it in fewer words than are given in these extracts.


Sample 18

Right down the bottom of the orchards there’s a a blackberry field and he said it must have been planted in about 1910 and it must be the oldest one in Britain and if it was managed it would keep a family without bothering about the orchards… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) Sample 19 My youngest daughter was about five years old and I was taking her to the dentist and I was coming down Southport Road near the police station and there was a line of traffic but I was at the front you know and there was… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) Finding idiolect features in real speakers These questions are very difficult to decide from the samples that are given. Although the subject-matter is different and one is speaking about a frightening personal experience while the other is talking about a blackberry patch, there are some marked similarities between the samples. One of the most distinctive features is the use of the co-ordinating link ‘and’ between unrelated clauses, which can be clearly seen in a rough grammatical analysis set out in Tables 3.2 and 3.3. Another marked feature in both samples is the high incidence of simple, oneor two-word grammatical subjects, the most complex being ‘My youngest daughter’, which is in contrast to the more complex adverbials found in both: ‘Right down the bottom of the orchards’; ‘down Southport Road near the police station’. Despite some embedded clauses in Sample 18, the overall impression of both examples is one of simple, straightforward delivery: the grammar and lexical choice are standard and give no clues as to the geographical origins of the speakers, and these aspects are again relatively neutral stylistically speaking. Therefore, the reader of these extracts might be forgiven for concluding that both could have been spoken by the same person, and would find it hard to conclude anything about the personality or personalities involved. In reality, these samples were taken from two different speakers, both female, both in their forties, but one from South Wales (Sample 18) and the other from the north of England. Nonetheless, on the page, in a standard orthography which does not seek to convey accent or prosodic features, the two women ‘read’ in quite a similar fashion. At this point, it could be argued that the notion of idiolect is flawed, that is to say, speakers are not in fact that different from one another, and that people who


Table 3.2 Clause analysis of Sample 18 (blackberry narrative)

Table 3.3 Clause analysis of Sample 19 (accident narrative)

are undertaking informative discourse, such as these examples, will use similar language (i.e. co-ordinated linking, simple subjects and so on). The implication being that aspects such as gender, age or discourse objective are more salient than individual factors. However, the point is not so much this—although that is an interesting notion to consider—but rather that once speech is transferred to the page, and the dynamic sound qualities are eliminated, a fairly extensive sample is needed in order to establish typical structural and lexical choices of that individual speaker. For example, in a bigger sample it might become clear that the first speaker had a marked propensity for embedded clauses, whereas the second speaker used very few. Or it might be the case that the first speaker always placed adverbial phrases of location in the sentence initial position, while the second usually placed them in the less marked end-of-clause position. In terms of lexical choice and style of speaking the first of these speakers uses the emphatic expression ‘right down the bottom of the orchards’, and the superlative form ‘the oldest one in Britain’ and expresses the point about the prolificness of the blackberry patch somewhat hyperbolically: ‘it would keep a family without bothering about the orchards’. A more extensive sampling might support the idea that this particular speaker generally had a liking for lively hyperbole rather than understatement. In other words, this speaker would rarely choose to put something plainly and


simply as ‘at the bottom’ or ‘possibly one of the oldest’ or ‘would provide enough blackberries for a family to use’, choosing the more emphatic alternative by preference. The point to note is that short, randomly chosen samples of real individuals speaking tend not to contain a high density of markers of distinctive language use. A reader analysing recurrent forms and trying to establish something about character has a difficult task, since they will need to uncover relevant features and then look for them in an extended sample. It is this difficult task which the creative writer at times attempts to eliminate in their representation of speech, either condensing a large number of salient features into a small space, or, more often, latching on to one or two marked features which are intended to give an impression of idiolect without distracting the reader by being too difficult to read. Fictional individuals speaking Since idiolect in real speech carries with it a strong identity-bearing element, and since, whether we like it or not, many judgements that are made about speakers are strongly influenced by how the ideas are conveyed—the tone, accent, mode of expression and so on—rather than the content per se, it is unsurprising that creative writers find the representation of speech a useful tool, to mark both character and the contrast between characters. When I was studying Shakespeare at university, I was struck by a comment of my tutor’s on the following extract from Othello: Come, let us to the castle. News, friends, our wars are done, the Turks are drown’d How do our old acquaintance of the isle? Honey, you shall be well desired in Cypress; I have found great love amongst them: O my sweet, I prattle out of fashion, and I dote In mine own comforts… (Othello II:i) Here, the Moor excitedly rambles on and addresses his wife as ‘Honey’. At this, my tutor wrinkled up her nose disparagingly and said that she thought this must be wrong, that she never could imagine Othello using that form of address to Desdemona. Having an underdeveloped sense of both Shakespeare’s use of language and of Othello’s idiolect, I nodded dumbly, but realised that there was a world of fine-grained analysis relating to the presentation of speech which was as yet beyond me. The skilled creative writer does more than make characters present information through dialogue, he or she creates a sense of how they speak. Taking into account the fact that in actual speech lexico-grammatical markers of speaking style can be spread relatively thinly throughout the discourse, the creative writer needs to find ways of compressing features into a


smaller space, without losing comprehensibility,7 or, if they are seeking realism, plausibility. Therefore, in this section some short samples of fictional speaking are discussed with a view to seeing how writers choose to show distinctive individual language use, and, more importantly, what insight this can give for the study of speech in opposition to writing. The options available to writers There are several methods by which a writer can choose to convey something about the distinctive language use of a character. These include dialogue external comments by the author, as in the following extract from the short story ‘The Dead’ by James Joyce (my italics in this and subsequent extracts): His hot face had leaned forward a little too confidentially and he had assumed a very low Dublin accent so that the young ladies, with one instinct, received his speech in silence. (Joyce 1956:181) Here there is no dialogue material given to flesh out the precise wording of the anecdote he tells, and the effect of this is to place the focus less on the content of the story, and more on the reaction to the teller of the story (to his indiscreet closeness and adoption of a ‘low’ accent). This in turn brings out the mismatch of story to audience, since the genteel young ladies would ipso facto shudder to hear any story delivered in this manner, and the precise wording is immaterial to them or to the reader. Alternatively, authorial description of what was said can combine with direct representation of the speakers, as in the following: ‘I say I say what’s the matter there?’ The English ‘King’s Parade’ voice, scarcely above him, called out… ‘I say, haven’t I seen you before or something.’ ‘Trinity,’ The Consul found his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more ‘English’. (Lowry 1977:84) Here, there are not only dialogue external comments (The English “King’s Parade” voice…his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more “English”’) to help the reader understand the nature of the speakers’ style, but also examples of their direct speech, in which structures typical of the style (the repeated ‘I say’, and the filler ‘or something’) can be found. Finally, the author may choose simply to represent the distinctive speech without directing the reader through narratorial comments, as in the following example from P.G.Wodehouse:


Sample 20

I got ’em for ’im up at the big ’ahse. Coo! The old josser the plice belongs to didn’t arf chase me. ’E found me picking ’em and he sharted somefin at me and came runnin’ after me, but I copped ‘im on the shin wiv a stone and ’e stopped to rub it and I come away. (LEG) In this example the unorthodox orthography provides a strong sense of the character’s way of speaking, indicating the sounds of the cockney accent (‘’em’, ‘’im’, ‘plice’ etc.), together with vocabulary typical of the dialect (‘old josser’, ‘copped’) and grammatical or idiomatic constructions which match the rest (‘didn’t arf, ‘I come away’). There exist subtle mid-points between these three categories outlined above (author only comment; author comment plus direct speech; direct speech without author comment): for example, when an author chooses to provide a form of free indirect speech which contains hints of the distinctive language of the user but is not presented within the conventions of punctuation associated with direct speech and may be in the third person; or when, as in the example below, the direct speech is introduced by a comment as to the character’s psychological or attitudinal state. The comment can be interpreted as conveying manner of speech or alternatively might be construed as showing internal state: ‘Yes.’ He was cock-assuredly positive. ‘Life is a moral unity with a common thought.’ (O’Faolain 1970:85–6) Nonetheless, it is only the direct representation of speakers which is the focus for this section. This is because in choosing to represent speech with little or no authorial direction, the writer places the reader of a fictional text in something of the same position as a reader of a transcript of naturally occurring speech. As was noted above, a relatively long sample of actual speech is needed for the reader to gain a sense of the individual speaker’s style, and in the direct representation of speech in fiction a sense of what a writer thinks a reader needs in order to understand idiolect can be seen. Three characters contrasted In order to pursue this a little further, the representation of direct speech in a short story by P.G.Wodehouse is analysed in more detail. In the story, three characters contrast strongly with one another, and their individuality is brought out in part by means of the way they are represented as speaking. In ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girlfriend’ the ‘girlfriend’ in question is in fact a little girl called Gladys (the cockney whose speech style was discussed above). The story is one of wistful humour and is unusually sentimental for Wodehouse. The small girl, who has been evacuated from London to the country, is important in the


story, since the plot hinges on her being an ‘exotic’ and refreshing source of empowerment for the timid Lord Emsworth in his battle against the combined forces of his bullying sister, Constance, and his intransigent gardener, McAllister. As well as making her come alive, and highlighting the contrast between her social status and that of the lord, the alienating effect of the roughly ‘phonetic’ representation of her cockney speech helps to put the reader into something of the same position as Emsworth who is bewildered by her way of speaking. This bewilderment reaches its climax when, after she has been treated to tea in ‘the big ahse’ (against the wishes of Lady Constance), Emsworth and the butler conspire to provide a package of good things for her little brother: Sample 21

A wistful look came into Gladys’s eyes. ‘Could he ‘ave some flarze?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Lord Emsworth. ‘Certainly, certainly, certainly. By all means. Just what I was about to suggest my—er—what is flarze?’ Beach, the linguist, interpreted. ‘I think the young lady means flowers, your Lordship.’ (LEG) At this point, Wodehouse is being somewhat disingenuous, since, apart from a slight difference in vowel length, a cockney speaker and an ‘upper class’ RP speaker would pronounce the word ‘flowers’ in exactly the same, monosyllabic way. As was noted in the case of Dickens cited in Chapter 2, the opportunity offered by translation of speech on to the page is being fully used, and the alien spelling ‘flarze’ tricks the reader into assuming that such a misunderstanding could really happen, and with it comes the potential for humour. The third main player in the story is the Scottish gardener, McAllister, who sides with Emsworth’s sister, and who rules the garden with a rod of iron. It is he whom the small girl terms ‘the old josser the plice belongs to’ and who, due to the lord’s rather endearing lack of backbone, is in reality the owner, or rather, master, of the gardens. Constance and McAllister are conspiring to lay a gravel path along a mossy yew tree alley, a move which Emsworth abhors, but is too ineffectual and unassertive to counter. He meets the dreaded McAllister, and, in an exchange worthy of a how-not-todo-it example in an assertiveness handbook, avoids expressing his opinion: Sample 22

‘Morning, McAllister,’ said Lord Emsworth coldly. ‘Good morrrning, your lorrudsheep.’ […]


‘I was speaking to her leddyship yesterday’ ‘Oh?’ ‘About the gravel path I was speaking to her leddyship.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘Her leddyship likes the notion fine.’ ‘Indeed!’ […] ‘I’ll—er—I’ll think it over, McAllister.’ ‘Mphm.’ ‘I have to go to the village now. I will see you later.’ ‘Mphm.’ ‘Meanwhile, I will—er—think it over.’ ‘Mphm.’ (LEG) Unlike the little girl’s cockney dialect, McAllister’s Scottishness is conveyed by only a few orthographic oddities: the aggressive repeated ‘r’s in ‘morrrning’, combined with indication of lengthened syllables in ‘lorrudsheep’ (which perhaps also deliberately hints at the sheeplike nature of the lord, since the syllable ‘ship’ is indicated normally in the reference to the lionlike Lady Constance), and the alteration of the vowel length in ‘leddyship’. Additionally, apart from the unusual word ordering in ‘About the gravel path I was speaking to her leddyship’, the only candidate for a dialect feature in terms of grammar or lexis is the use of ‘fine’ as an adverb (in ‘Her leddysip likes the notion fine’), rather than its more standard use as an adjective (as in ‘a fine day’). Both speakers show a repetitive style of speaking, but, whereas the gardener has a dogged accretion of ideas which does not allow his master to get away from the topic of the gravel path, Emsworth’s repetitions are due to a lack of any effective possible answer to the issue. He is, by nature, reactive, and his malleable nature is mirrored in his style of speaking. In the example given above he responds with evasive monosyllables (‘Oh?’) until forced to give a reply of sorts (‘I’ll—er—I’ll think it over, McAllister’). By contrast, McAllister’s repeated monosyllabic grunts (‘Mphm’) give no quarter, and strongly convey that he is not to be diverted by such mealy-mouthed answers. Table 3.4 Clause analysis of Lord Emsworth’s speech


Table 3.5 Clause analysis of McAllister’s speech

The reactive and conciliatory nature of Emsworth, and the intransigence of the gardener can also be seen at the level of grammar (see Tables 3.4 and 3.5). McAllister’s measured clauses with their repeated mention of ‘her leddyship’ (a not-so-veiled threat, since Emsworth is ruled by his sister), in prepositional phrases at typical adverbial position (‘to her leddyship’ twice), and then brought forward to subject position (‘her leddyship likes’) to clinch the point are in contrast to the vague and more or less content-free repetitions of Emsworth (‘I’ll —er—I’ll think it over’). Whereas McAllister’s repeated clause structure (‘I was speaking…I was speaking’) has its own dogged, tank-like rhetoric, Emsworth’s procrastination and excuses (‘I will think’; ‘I have to go’; ‘I will see’; ‘I will think’) carry with them an air of desperation. Unlike McAllister, his speech is characterised by hesitancy, and he tends to make up for the lack of purpose and drive in what he says by use of deliberative adjuncts and other sentence links. For example, in the exchange about ‘flarze’ he hides his confusion by repeating ‘certainly’, and then ‘by all means’ and in the present example he launches into his final clause with the impressive sounding ‘meanwhile’. This has the effect of covering up, if inefficiently, the other shortcomings in his assertiveness. In contrast to both McAllister and Emsworth, Gladys is not a repetitive speaker, but runs on with an easy, and lively, delivery. Throughout the story in which she is a catalyst to a rebellion by Emsworth, she has no sense of the part she is playing. For example, when she asks for a bunch of flowers to give to her little brother, she has no idea of the ramifications of that request (i.e. that Emsworth does not have the power to give her flowers from his own garden because he is scared of his gardener). Therefore, while her speech is the most marked in its presentation, in other ways the impression remains one of simplicity. The effect is largely produced by adopting a grammatical feature which was isolated as being prevalent in the actual speakers discussed above: the use of ‘and’ to loosely join clauses together: I got ’em for ’im up at the big ’ahse. Coo! The old josser the plice belongs to didn’t arf chase me. ’E found me picking ’em and he sharted somefin at me and came runnin’ after me, but I copped ‘im on the shin wiv a stone and ’e stopped to rub it and I come away.


(LEG) The other distinctive features of her speech were discussed above, for example, the use of dialect vocabulary (‘josser’) and some non-standard grammatical features (‘I come away’). In general, of the three speakers under discussion, hers is the most distinctive ‘voice’, and the reason for this is that the visual alienation of the reader forces us to read her words aurally, and, in order to understand what she is saying, mentally (or physically) verbalise her utterances. Summary To conclude this brief survey of the language of three characters, in terms of distinctive aural properties three levels of typical variance from the norm can be seen: standard orthography, partially altered orthography and quasiphonetic orthography. In the case of Emsworth, his status as a speaker of Standard English is underlined by the fact that his speech is not indicated as differing in phoneme quality from standard spelling. This convention is the norm, despite the fact that, due to the history of English spelling, speakers of Standard English using RP vary considerably from any direct phoneme to letter relationship. For example, postvocalic ‘r’ (an ‘r’ which comes after a vowel in a syllable as in ‘form’, as opposed to before, as in ‘frame’) is silent in the dialect of such speakers (unlike the redoubtable McAllister, a Scot whose Scottishness is brought out by the elongation of this feature in ‘morrrning’). Any divergence from standard spelling on the part of a writer (or rather an author who is regarded as being capable of correct spelling and is thus seen as manipulating the representation of speech for some reason) has the effect of strongly highlighting the aural qualities (the accent, or less usually, the intonation) of a speaker, as was seen in the speech of Gladys. Such an act on the part of a writer can never be undertaken without the reader being led to think that the speaker is ‘abnormal’ in some way (even if the sounds being conveyed, far from being unusual, are closer to the way an actual speaker speaks, and probably closer to the sound qualities of the majority of the population). Therefore, at a very minimum, unorthodox orthography in the representation of speech acts as a signal to a reader, firstly, to read with their aural sense ‘switched on’, and, whereas the skilled reader reads mainly visually, to slow down to consider the actual sounds a speaker is supposed to be making in the light of the letters being presented. The fact that a reader is being asked to do this is rarely without a secondary underlying purpose, and a second signal sent to the reader by unusual spelling is to look for a reason to account for the writer’s unusual orthographic choices. The speech of Lord Emsworth, containing as it does no odd spellings other than his mystified quoting of the child’s ‘flarze’, does not carry these signals to the reader. He is the ‘normal’ speaker, and the other two characters are the ones whose aural nature is brought out: the cockney and the Scot. If one wanted to


build an ideological thesis, the fact that implicit power relations are frequently mirrored in speech representation by means of this convention would be a good initial hypothesis. However, suffice it to say, the idiosyncrasies of Emsworth’s speech have to be looked for solely in the structure of his language, the lexis and grammar, rather than the indications of sound quality as such. Rather than a sustained attempt to convey details of an individual speaker, a writer usually chooses, as in the case of McAllister, one or two markers to hint at a more general tendency in the speech. At the level of phonemes this is marked by slightly unusual spelling, at the level of word by occasional dialect or less orthodox forms, and in terms of grammar some alteration of normal word ordering or idiomatic turns of phrase. More difficult for a writer to sustain successfully is a full-blown attempt to convey speech sounds and distinctive grammar, an attempt at which can be seen in the speech of Gladys. Even this faithful rendition shows some inconsistencies: ‘he’ as well as “e’; ‘picking’ as well as ‘runnin” and so on. This returns us to a key point in the relationship between speech and writing. Despite the apparently straightforward one-to-one relation between forms in the two channels, when detailed comparisons are made, the impossibility of using standard written forms (as opposed to the phonetic alphabet) to convey actual speech in detail becomes evident. In creative writing the reader takes an active part in the process by learning the conventions adopted by writers, and colluding in the illusion that anything like real speech can be represented. As readers, we draw on our knowledge of the spoken form and use this to gain sufficient sense of what the author is trying to convey. However, this process is almost impossible without a prior sense of the typical sounds and structures being represented, and, however detailed the rendition, there is always an element of interpretation on the part of the reader. If as a writer I present you with the forms ‘kine slice’ and ask you what they might mean, I would predict that speakers who were brought up in Staffordshire would be among the first to see how a child from that area could use them to represent the words ‘council house’. As for the rest of us, even when the point is explained, we can gather only an imperfect aural perception of how the speaker would actually articulate these words unless we already know how the dialect sounds. Writers who try to represent speech need to have a sense of the ‘pool’ of language knowledge they can assume a reader has access to. A large part of the time they depend on the established convention that unmarked spelling and standard English lexical and grammatical forms represent normal speech. When a writer steps outside this convention the limited potential for the normal system of orthography to represent speech is highlighted. The effect is to present the speech as somehow ‘marginal’, ‘abnormal’ or, at the very least, quaint and different from standard speakers, whether or not such a speaker would seem so in real life. Moving on from literary contexts, it is possible to gain some more insights about speech and writing in general when the transference of real speakers’


idiolects from speech into writing is analysed. The case-study presented below returns to the transcription of parliamentary speakers introduced in Chapter 2, and looks at the way in which some speakers seem to need less alteration to their discourse in order to make sense in the new channel. A CASE-STUDY: PARLIAMENTARY SPEAKERS IN TRANSCRIPTION The final section in this discussion looks at the way in which real individual speakers are represented in the written channel for purposes other than a linguist’s transcript. In Chapter 2 some broad statistics for the translation of speech on to the page were described and it was shown that for the debate as a whole the token total had dropped by some 17 per cent from Text S (the ‘full’ transcript made from sound recordings) to Text W (the Hansard version prepared as the official written record of what was said). In the study described here we are interested in individual speakers and the way that idiolect is represented in a written record of what was said during debate. The hypothesis being investigated is that some speakers use language in a way that is more amenable to transfer to the written channel than others. Differences between speaker ‘loss’ in transcription The first point to note is that not all speakers undergo the same level of loss in the process of transcription. Table 3.6 shows the number and the percentage difference between Text S and Text W for twenty speakers. Figures here are for individual speakers throughout the debate. That is to say, all utterances made by each speaker in all discourse categories were counted, whether the speaker was holding the floor for a sustained period, or simply intervening. Column one shows the three-letter code used to identify individual speakers. All speakers showed a reduction in token totals. These ranged from just under 100 to over 700, with the mean reduction being around 300 tokens ‘lost’ from the speech of an individual speaker. In percentage terms these figures represent losses from a speaker’s contribution to a debate from around 6 per cent up to more than 30 per cent. Comparing high- and low-token-loss speakers Good candidates for detailed analysis in the present investigation are speakers who rank at the top and bottom of the table, since we might assume that a large drop in token total represents a large alteration to the discourse, and this alteration in turn suggests that the transcribers felt the need to alter the discourse. Equally a small reduction in transcription, by the same reasoning, might be assumed to be


Table 3.6 Number and percentage difference Text W from Text S for twenty speakers (ranked according to difference)

indicative of discourse which the transcriber judged to be acceptable and coherent in the new channel as it stood. This final part of the chapter looks at samples from two speakers who rank near these positions. They were chosen because they have many characteristics in common. They are both Labour Members of Parliament, they are both speaking in the context of a full-blown debate (as opposed to Prime Minister’s questions or other business of the House), and both are experienced speakers with the ability to hold an audience. Furthermore, both have, in their different ways, a very lively and engaging style of delivery. Analysis of a high-loss speaker Despite these similarities, the first speaker, TRA, undergoes a remarkable drop in the transference of his idiolect into the written channel, whereas FAU does not. In the following tables showing samples from the speakers the right-hand column shows the written form as it was divided into sentences for the Official Report, while the left-hand column shows the equivalent material from a transcript of the sound recordings. Items that are found in one text but not in the other are italicized to highlight the changes. Sample 23

Sample 23a


TEXTS and that really is the essential about television it’s about entertainment and not government that it’s about the ratings that it’s about the competition between each channel to see who can pull in the most viewers whether it’s Eastenders, Coronation Street or whatever and ultimately it will do the same for politics like it has done with football where we’ve seen crowds decrease like it ha . . where religion on Sundays is now Harry Secombe singing 1950s songs at 6.30 on Songs of Praise or whatever That in effect is what television is about it is about a branch of showbusiness (Author’s data)

TEXT W The essence of television is this: it is about entertainment, not government. It is about ratings and about competition between channels to pull in the most viewers to watch Eastenders, Coronation Street or whatever. Ultimately, television will do the same for politics as it has done for football—the crowds have decreased. Religion on Sunday is now Harry Secombe singing 1950s songs at 6.30 pm on Songs of Praise. That is what television is about—it is a branch of show-business. (OR)

Breaking sentence boundaries The first thing to note about TRA (the high-loss speaker) is that it was difficult to locate breaks in the Text S transcript where a relatively short ‘free-standing’ extract could be presented. This speaker’s manner of conveying ideas typically explodes standard sentence boundaries and links long sections of ideas in a seamless whole. In the present sample (which had to begin with a continuation of a previous idea because of this very problem) the words ‘that’ (used both as a demonstrative and relative pronoun and in noun clauses), ‘where’ used to introduce loose relative clauses acting as exemplification (‘where we’ve seen…’; ‘where religion…is…’) and the co-ordinating conjunction ‘and’ join several ideas together without an obvious break. In the written channel the ideas are tidied into five sentences, with the accompanying grammatical alterations. These include the elimination of the more unusual uses of ‘that’ and of transformation of the floating ‘where'-clauses into separate main clauses (‘where we’ve seen crowds decrease’ becoming ‘the crowds have decreased’). Differences in referencing Additionally, the original spoken discourse had a system of ‘distant’ anaphoric reference. The speaker in the example given above begins with ‘and that’ referring backwards (‘anaphorically’) to a prior topic, the ensuing ‘that’— clauses and ‘where’—clauses serve to continue the line of thought by means of examples (competition → politics and football → debasement of religion), a line of thought which gives the impression of the speaker joining the ideas ‘off the cuff’


as they occur to him. These examples then culminate in a further anaphoric marker in ‘That…is what television is about.’ The written form shows a different system of linking at work. The sample begins with a forward marker (a cataphoric reference) in ‘The essence of television is this…’ and, while it goes on to retain the central reference to television using the pronoun ‘it’, this is sustained for a far shorter period than in the spoken. While in Text S the chain of reference to television goes: television, it’s, it’s, it’s, it will, it has, it ha[s], etc.; in the Text W version the distance between full noun and pronoun is shorter: [essence of] television, it is, it is, television, it has, etc. The logic of juxtaposition Despite the apparently ‘fluid’ flow of ideas in the Text S version it has its own internal logic which goes to make the speaker a persuasive one. He establishes the point that television is a debasing influence by comparing the proposed televising of the House to a series of negative examples and this allows him to make the final statement that television is a branch of show-business with the sense established that this is undesirable. This type of rhetoric works less well on the page, where, rather than a piling on of negative examples the effect is more measured, and the ‘Religion on Sunday…’ example appears to have little connection with the previous ideas. The low-loss speaker Sample 24 TEXTS the House may come to resemble and I should warn the House of this a perpetual game of musical chairs as Members try to get in on the camera but what of the security implications we’ve had tear gas in the Chamber some of us were here we’ve had red paint and we’ve had what I must call horse manure thrown in here I am simply explaining the dangers that will certainly arise in the future were we to be foolish enough to allow the intervention of the camera lens. now could there exist a greater temptation to the demonstrator (Author’s data)

Sample 24a TEXT W The House may come to resemble a perpetual game of musical chairs as Honourable Members try to get on camera. What of the security implications? We have had tear gas in the Chamber— some of us were here. We have had red paint and what I must call horse manure thrown in here. I am simply explaining the dangers that will certainly arise in the future were we to be foolish enough to allow the intervention of the camera lens. Could there exist a greater temptation to the to the [sic] demonstrators? (OR)


Unlike the TRA sample, this speaker’s discourse undergoes very little alteration in the process of transcription. Although the speaker has a lively speaking style the grammar he uses is closer to standard grammar as found in text books than TRA’s, and consequently falls more naturally into distinct sentences. For example, in the opening of this extract we have the clause structure shown in Table 3.7. Speaking in sentences In general the discourse consists of relatively straightforward main clauses ([MC]) and subordinate clauses ([SC]) marked by normal subordinators such as ‘as’. The contrast between the speakers is clearly shown if a comparison is made of two points in the Text W version where the transcriber uses a dash to loosely relate two main clauses: Table 3.7 Clause structure of a low-token-loss speaker

TRA:

Ultimately, television will do the same for politics as it has done for football—the crowds have decreased. FAU: We have had tear gas in the Chamber—some of us were here. In the spoken original of TRA’s contribution not only was the first clause linked back to previous material by ‘and’, the second clause was in the form of a quasi-relative clause beginning ‘where we’ve seen…’: TRA (Text S):

…and ultimately it will do the same for politics like it has done with football where we’ve seen crowds decrease… Additionally, TRA’s non-standard use of ‘like’ instead of ‘as’ and ‘with football’ rather than the more usual ‘for football’ are both changed in the written version.


Presence of spoken mode features FAU’s manner of speaking is altogether more measured and generally closer to the norms of standard grammar, suggesting perhaps a higher degree of preplanning on the part of this speaker (who was a professional actor in earlier days), but despite this there are some spoken mode features which are eliminated in the process of transcription: • co-ordinating links used to introduce relatively dissimilar topics: ‘and I should’; ‘but what of’ • interrupted clauses: ‘may come to resemble [interrupting clause= I should warn…] a perpetual game of musical chairs’ • repetition: ‘we’ve had tear gas…we’ve had red paint…we’ve had what I must call…’8 • discourse marking: ‘now, could there exist…’ Summary In order for these speakers to make sense on the page, and conform to the norms of sentence structure and cohesion of written mode, one of them underwent a far greater degree of alteration. This speaker, TRA, showed a rhetorical style based around the juxtaposition of ideas and the sustained linking of topics over long sections of discourse with little explicit marking of the precise logical relations between them. Such a style depends greatly on the manner in which it is delivered, and not all speakers can carry off the performance well, nor does the rhetoric transfer well on to the page where, without the emotional vigour and sincerity of the speaker, the reader comes to ask difficult questions about the scope of the ideas (for example, in the statement that ‘television will do the same for politics as it has done for football—the crowds have decreased’, on reflection we might ask ‘who are “the crowds” in the analogy to politics?’ or ‘If television is bringing the debates into the houses of millions of viewers, rather than a handful of people in the Strangers’ Gallery, in what sense will “crowds” decrease?’). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This chapter has dealt with the concept of individual language use and the forms it takes in the two channels. The discussion highlighted one of the underlying areas of contrast between the two forms of language: that an individual speaker is less shaped by the educational and normative processes which literacy and the conventions of the written form entail. While speakers follow certain cultural conventions in the choices they make when they produce language, these are less highly articulated than the standards and norms of the written form. Another way of putting this is that there is greater scope for acceptable diversity within speech,


where judgement tends to be based more on communicative success rather than ‘correctness’ and compliance with a standard. In terms of literary contexts the point was made that the presentation of a fictional idiolect is a sophisticated process. The lexical and grammatical features which mark out a real speaker can be quite hard to pinpoint accurately from a relatively small sample, and the writer therefore constructs a condensed set of markers for a fictional character. The point was also made that the mismatch between standard orthography and standard pronunciation in English leads to the convention that non-standard spelling is a cue for readers to read aurally, but that few writers sustain an accurate attempt at conveying speech sounds. The problems for a creative writer of representing speech idiolect on the page share some features with the issues raised in Chapter 2 concerning the representation of interactions. There it was noted that features which are typical of actual interactions, such as false starts and overlaps, are not only difficult to represent on the page, they are also read as indicators of heightened emotion or problematic exchanges. Similarly, with the representation of individual voices in the written channel there exists a convention that standard orthography and grammar indicate ‘normal’ speech, and yet, as shown in the discussions of sample of actual speech in this chapter and the previous one, real spoken mode is frequently non-standard. However, if a writer chooses to be more ‘realistic’, the reader automatically takes this to be a cue that the speaker is abnormal in some way. In ideological terms it is interesting to consider what the implications of this convention are. Despite the fact that only some 4 per cent of the population, it has been suggested, speak Standard English, the majority of normal voices in fiction are presented as speakers of this form. For a writer to choose to show a less conventional, if more representative, idiolect is to create speech that is ‘foregrounded’ and unduly noticeable. The transference of the language of an individual from speech into writing is a complex process since it involves not only assumptions about the individual speaker, whether real or, in the case of creative writing, fictional, but also of the individual who is producing the written text. A central aim of this book is that the actual realisations of language and their contexts should not be overlooked in the analysis. Indeed, I am arguing that in the case of a comparison of speech and writing the precise status of the samples of discourse being described and contrasted needs to be at the heart of the exegesis. As was noted in Chapter 1, it is easy enough to find interesting areas of difference between samples of speech and writing. However, the problem for the analyst is to tease out those differences which are attributable to the channel of the discourse from those which are incidental and due to some other factor. In considering the relationship between individual language use in the two channels, and the transference of discourse from one channel to another, some of the underlying contrasts have emerged. In Chapter 4 I go on to consider mode and channel from the perspective of the contexts in which speech and writing are produced.


EXERCISES Task:

Consider whether you speak (a) with an accent; (b) in a dialect. Do you know of anyone (including yourself!) who has a particularly distinctive way of speaking in terms of typical speech habits? Do you know anyone who has changed the way they speak? Why did they do this? Task:

Look at the following ‘howlers’. Try to categorise them on the basis of the conclusions given in this chapter. She likes to think of herself as very lucky, rick and absorbent. talkerable [talkative] imaginated [imaginative] joville [jovial] no one thinks politcals when they see a Royale, They just think ‘I have seen a Royale’ at least he is a open minded man with a browd spectriom You really made a foul of yourself tonight You’re like a bear with a sour head I’ve had a skin full of Roger and Jane Task:

Consider the representation of speech in your favourite novel. Does the speech of any of the characters show distinctive orthography? If so, what reasons can you see for this? FURTHER READING Harris, J. (1993) Introducing Writing, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Honey, J. (1989) Does Accent Matter? The Pygmalion factor, London: Faber and Faber. Kress, G. (1993) Learning to Write, London: Routledge. Page, N. (1988) Speech in the English Novel, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Short, M. (1988) ‘Speech presentation, the novel and the press’, in Van Peer, W. (ed.) The Taming of the Text: explorations in language, literature and culture, London: Routledge. Wilkinson, J. (1995) Introducing Standard English, London: Penguin.

Chapter 4 Analysing speech and writing in context

INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter the sophisticated process of an individual writer presenting speech idiolect in prose fiction, and real speakers’ idiolect in transcription were discussed. This chapter draws on the issues raised by this process in an investigation of the influence of context on the type of language produced. The particular interest in this chapter is in considering how the same information is presented differently in the two channels. For example, the immediacy of the spoken channel allows it to be used for commentary on events as they happen. In this context the producer of the language has a limited potential to assess accurately the implication of the events or their outcome, and this has an effect on the type of language produced. On the other hand, the less mutable ‘recording’ nature of the written channel permits a post hoc commentary on events, with all the deliberative editorial processes of constructing written material, not to mention the wisdom of hindsight. In contrasting a spoken and written commentary on the same events some sense of the influence of these factors on the linguistic choices made can be gained. Used in this sense the term context relates to the temporal and situational factors shaping the discourse— when, where and why the speaking or writing happened. The second way in which the notion of context is used in this chapter relates to the influence of the context of reception and the medium by which discourse is conveyed. In the second section of analysis the focus is on differences between comparable spoken and written texts which are partly ascribable to the differing needs of discourse-to-be-read and discourse-to-be-heard. For example, those who write a screenplay dialogue which must stand alone in the spoken channel via the film soundtrack medium must assess the needs of a listening and watching audience. In looking at the changes made to novel dialogue when it is transferred to the screen the opportunity arises to consider the nature of these largely channel oriented changes.

ANALYSING SPEECH AND WRITING IN CONTEXT 95

Problems of comparability In order to do this a brief return to methodological matters is needed. Up to now the informational content of the samples of speech and writing has not always been closely matched. For example, in the investigation of interactions in real speech and then in creative writing in Chapter 2 roughly similar content was discussed—two men making small talk, people discussing an object in their sight, and so on. This was balanced somewhat by the casestudy material on transcription in Chapters 2 and 3, where the same person’s discourse on the same topic was ‘translated’ into the written channel, but the point was not raised as a methodological issue. In a comparison of speech and writing from the point of view of the influence of context the choice of texts needs particular attention. This is because the lexico-grammatical ‘texture’ of any sample of language can be influenced by factors other than channel, for example the genre or level of formality. The problem for the linguist studying spoken language in opposition to written language is to isolate those differences between samples which can be ascribed to the channel of the discourse. In Chapter 1 I drew a distinction between channel, mode and medium and suggested a definition of mode, in contrast to the other terms, which would be useful for a comparison of speech and writing. This was based on the idea that the channel of production influences the potential for a language user to communicate in a particular way, and that, although certain specialised types of discourse such as the formal lecture or the personal e-mail can go beyond the norms of the channel, the factors underlying the nature of each channel work to produce two modes of language. The strengths of each channel work to influence the functions to which they are put, for example personal face-to-face communication and interaction versus the stable communication of information across time and space to an anonymous recipient. Within this primary channel choice, conscious mode decisions may also become relevant in the construction of discourse. For example in Chapter 3 I considered the sophisticated multi-mode choices available to the competent writer who may seek to simulate speech idiolect. The mode issues in which we are interested in this study are the degree of creative shaping which the discourse under consideration has undergone, and whether the author of the discourse opts to simulate language of the spoken in the written or vice versa. Of fundamental interest is the interplay between the context of production and the nature of the discourse. For example, it might lead us to ask whether, if a novelist creates a dialogue on the page, this is more or less like actual speech than a screenplay version of the same interaction written to be performed in the spoken channel. In order to have a good variety of styles available for comparison the texts in the present study are selected from both literary and non-literary sources, and from live and scripted speech. A second criterion in choosing texts for comparison in this area is that wherever possible the language should be

96 ANALYSING SPEECH AND WRITING IN CONTEXT

produced for purposes other than linguistic analysis. It is possible to generate spoken and written narratives, anecdotes, reports, directions and so on quite easily for the purposes of a survey of speech and writing. This has the advantage of the potential for increased experimental validity, such as random choice of subject and control groups, but these advantages are outweighed, when language is the object of study, by the greater potential for the production by the subjects of discourse influenced by the experimental context. Therefore, less satisfactory although it may seem in terms of finding large samples of strictly controlled comparable material, the real world should be the source. A third criterion regarding choice of material in the study of spoken as opposed to written language should be the consideration of topic. That is to say, it is not sufficient to find samples of speech which are more or less ‘about’ the same thing as a written text, or which were produced by the same person. It is important to find pairs of texts with a high level of shared identity. One should be able to say with confidence that the texts are not merely similar in terms of topic, but that they are presenting the same information in a different channel. This criterion is not without philosophical problems, raising as it does the issue of identity. Nevertheless in terms of methodology it is not difficult to point to pairs of texts which on an intuitive basis have sufficient shared identity for comparison to take place. Some examples of acceptable and unacceptable pairings might make this clearer. Sources of comparable material from the spoken and written channels which have the desirable high level of shared identity include: • the televised proceedings of Parliament and their written report (the Official Report or ‘Hansard’) which is held in most libraries; • the language spoken during formal meetings and the written minutes which record this; • a commentary of a sporting event and the newspaper report of the same event; • film actors’ version of a dialogue in a screen adaptation of a novel and the original written dialogue; • a television soundtrack and the sub-titles which are prepared for hearingimpaired viewers. Less acceptable would be to compare the following: • a conversation about hairstyles and a written advertisement for hair-care products (the differences might lie in the difference between a conversation and an advertisement); • samples of the language of one person taken from spoken and written channels (again, the type of speech and the purpose of the discourse may influence the language too strongly); • the spoken language of airline pilots compared to the language in a textbook on air navigation.


The aim should be to find samples which share precisely the same topic, rather than a similar topic, and in any conclusions reached consideration should be given to the problems of comparability. It could also be argued that the purpose of the sample, for example a formal written record of a meeting versus the less formal interplay of people at the meeting as decisions are reached, outweighs the channel influence. However, the approach taken here is that, as suggested above and in previous chapters, the link between the channel and the functions to which it is put is fundamental and therefore an important and interesting factor in determining the nature of the two forms. That is to say, written mode tends to be more formal, to show more standardisation and to reflect the status quo of power relations in interactions and so on, and it does this because of the nature of the channel and the restrictions and potentialities it brings. Introduction to the samples This chapter looks at the speech versus writing issue in the context of two paired examples of discourse. The first pair consists of live commentary of an event and subsequent written prose commentary of the same event, the second pair gives a section of film dialogue contrasted to the original version found in a novel. The relatively small space available makes the analysis of a large sample of data within each variety impossible. However, the decision to concentrate on two pairs of texts in the present chapter was made not only on the basis of practicality. First, the importance of considering examples from the point of view of topic matching cannot be overemphasised. Without a fixed point of comparison it is difficult to assign linguistic features to differences in channel. When a spoken text and a written one purport to represent the same information or events there is more justification for suggesting that the differences found are due to channel. Second, the aim of the present work is not the description of the stylistic features of particular varieties, but is rather to seek features generated by differences between the nature of spoken language and written. Four texts are under consideration in this study from the following areas of discourse: • • • •

spontaneous spoken commentary non-fiction prose commentary novel dialogue screenplay dialogue.

The actual samples are as follows: (a) extract from a transcription of the television commentary on the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight (30 October 1974)


(b) extracts from The Fight (TF) by Norman Mailer detailing the same events in the fight described under (a) (c) extract of dialogue from Under the Volcano (UV) by Malcolm Lowry (d) extract from transcription of dialogue from film version of (c) above. Contextual factors In this section I consider the background context of the two commentaries — the when, where and why factors relating to each. The pairing of spontaneous sports commentary and its matching prose partner gives the opportunity to analyse samples of speech and writing at the extremes of a contextual continuum. A live sports commentary is shaped by the events which are happening at the time of speaking, and in the case of a televised commentary the discourse is directly linked to actions seen by the recipients of the commentary. A written commentary on the same events is shaped more by the crafting techniques of the author, who, if he or she is to convey a sense of a complete event, must decide which actions are most significant in order to summarise the multitude of moves which make up a sporting event and convey them coherently to readers. The skill of the speaking commentator is to build a picture of an event providing sufficient information for the viewer (or in the case of radio broadcast, the listener) to follow the action. The discourse produced is shaped by the events being commentated on, and this fact alone puts it at the extreme uncrafted end of the continuum, with the creator of the discourse spinning a usually unbroken thread of language under the pressure of a live audience (the language of commentators is usually remarkably fluent and free from normal speaker production errors, such as hesitations). The commentator in the spoken channel must attempt to maintain interest throughout an event and this will also lead to an added element of spontaneity as, despite any predictability in terms of the event, the speaker must work in extra material to keep the attention of the listener.1 On the other hand, any written commentary on a sporting event is likely to be written after the action has been completed from notes made during the event. While there may be time constraints in the case of a newspaper commentary as the writer will have a deadline to fulfil, he or she still has greater opportunity to shape and edit the material, an opportunity that is not available to the creator of live spoken commentary. In the next section I consider the second type of contextual factors—for whom, and how. In terms of the background context both the dialogues are highly crafted samples of discourse. The first example shows a dialogue from a novel (with the authorial commentary and intervening descriptions edited out to make the comparison easier). The nature of a screen adaptation of such a dialogue is such that we might imagine, initially, that it would be closer to actual speech than the dialogue found in the novel. That is to say, since the screen version is delivered via the spoken


channel by actors there is the potential for intonational and interactive nuances which the page version cannot give. However, the other contextual factors—the fact that the discourse is produced for a listening and watching audience rather than a reader with the benefit of authorial presence, and the conventions of the screen medium, limit and shape the screen dialogue in ways which serve to keep it distinct from the norms of actual interaction. ANALYSIS OF PAIRED TEXTS This section contains general and more detailed comparisons of pairs of texts which convey the same events in different channels. Boxing match conunentary in speech and writing In this section the first pair of texts is analysed: the spoken and written commentaries on the boxing match introduced above. In each case the texts will first be presented with a brief initial summary of dominant features. This in turn will be followed by a detailed comparison of the language used, and the implications for broader conclusions about the speech-writing issue. Initial comparison The following extract (Sample 25) is a transcription of the live broadcast commentary taken from the opening seconds of the first round: Sample 25

Here we go. Ali quickly across the round [sic] Round one Ali bouncing around shifting left to right George moves slow Ali gets the first punch in a light right-hand taken on the forehead by George Foreman the Champion Foreman moves in slow trying to stop his man Ali looks like he’s ready to go here, he’s not staying away, he’s going after his man Foreman comes in Foreman a bit cautious in the first round looking to drop that left hook [cheers cover commentary] Foreman backs his man to the far corner there’s that left upper cut and jabs to the body of Muhammad Ali Ali tries to hang on to the head of George Foreman Foreman dances now moves Ali with a right hand leading in has Foreman slightly confused with that right-hand lead which I haven’t seen too many times before


Ali certainly dancing slipping punches, sliding around both ways Foreman’s idea is to back him up in the corner and when they get tight whale away with that vicious hook to the body of Muhammad Ali Ali lashes out with a light left (Author’s transcript) The following extracts conveying the equivalent sections of the fight were taken from the written commentary: Sample 25a

The bell! Through a long unheard sigh of collective release, Ali charged across the ring. He looked as big and determined as Foreman, so he held himself, as if he possessed the true threat. They collided without meeting, their bodies still five feet apart. Each veered backward like similar magnetic poles repelling one another forcibly. Then Ali came forward again, Foreman came forward, they circled, they feinted, they moved in an electric ring, and Ali threw the first punch, a tentative left. It came up short. Then he drove a lightning-strong right straight as a pole into the stunned center of Foreman’s head, the unmistakable thwomp of a highpowered punch. A cry went up […] Foreman charged in rage. Ali compounded the insult. He grabbed the Champion around the neck and pushed his head down, wrestled it down crudely and decisively to show Foreman he was considerably rougher than anybody warned, and relations had commenced […] Up and down the press rows, one exclamation was leaping, ‘He’s hitting him with rights’ Ali had not punched with such authority in seven years. Champions do not hit other champions with right-hand leads. Not in the first round. It is the most difficult and dangerous punch. Difficult to deliver and dangerous to oneself… (TF Chapter 13) The first striking contrast between these samples which deal with the same events is that of immediacy versus distance. In the spoken commentary the relevant time is ‘now’ and the dominant tense is the present: Here we go George moves slow and so on. In contrast to this the written presents the details as ‘past’: Ali charged across the ring he looked… The primary distinction is not due to the tenses used, however. In a written context, the present tense can be used in what is termed the ‘historical present’ where events which are assumed to be past by the reader because of the


surrounding context are given using present tense verbs. That is to say, Mailer could have chosen to write: Ali charges across the ring He looks… and retained a sense of the events being over and done with. More important in generating a sense of greater or lesser immediacy is a difference in presentation of the participants between the texts. Action versus evaluation While both examples focus on actions, being, in their different channels, commentaries specifically on action, Sample 25 gives a stronger sense of individual actions happening through time in a linear manner, whereas the written version, Sample 25a, incorporates evaluative statements within the presentation of the action. Thus in the opening of Sample 25 we have a series of actions culminating in a comment (shown in Table 4.1). On the other hand, the equivalent section in Sample 25a combines evaluative material in with straightforward action (shown in Table 4.2). Shaping a narrative Furthermore, while both texts are of necessity focused on actions, there is a difference in the organisation of the presentation of action. In the sample of spoken commentary there is little sense of ‘shape’ to the discourse, other than that provided by the flow of the action. Where evaluative statements are made they are frequently made during a lull in the action. That is to say, when there is action it provides the informational basis of the discourse, and when there is less action, or repetitive action, the commentator falls back on evaluation as opposed to straight description. Table 4.1 Action versus evaluation in spoken commentary

Almost the reverse is true of the written commentary. The opening paragraph builds to a climax through the focus firstly being on the evaluation of the boxers who are ‘big’, ‘determined’, ‘threatening’. From this preliminary lull in the action, with the sense of the physical power and presence of the fighters being established, the discourse moves on to a rapid sequence of actions (collide, veer,


Table 4.2 Action versus evaluation in written commentary

come forward, circle, feint, move, throw, drive), giving the impression of a sudden onset of the serious business of the fight and culminating in a sensational punch from Ali (‘a lightning-strong right…a high-powered punch’). In fact, when compared with the video tape and the sound commentary, the written version takes some artistic liberties with the sequence of the action in order to set up this pleasing structure and denouement in the right-handed punch from Ali. In the spoken commentary the equivalent to the spectacular punch which ends the first paragraph of Sample 25a is: Ali with a right hand leading in has Foreman slightly confused with that right-hand lead which I haven’t seen too many times before… This mundane comment contrasts with the two paragraphs of admiration and awe which the right-hand lead generates in the written commentary. The presence of the author A closer analysis of the descriptions of the fighters in the two texts shows up further distinctions between the spoken and written discourse. In Sample 25a (the written text) there is a stronger sense of the individual who is authoring the text as an interpreter of the actions, whereas in Sample 25, the live commentary, a more literal approach is taken and the author of the discourse rarely steps beyond the terms of reference of the immediate context (i.e. the opening round of a major boxing match). The spoken commentary is concerned with the physical facts of the matter: the speed, strength or angle of an action. On the other hand, in Sample 25a the concern is with relating actions to broader themes and/or implications. Thus in the spoken commentary movements are described in straightforward physical terms: quickly,


slow, left to right. Where comments are made as to the intentions or inner states of the fighters these tend to relate to immediate context: Foreman’s idea is to back him up in the corner and when they get tight whale away with that vicious hook to the body of Muhammad Ali In Sample 25a actions take on portentous significance relating to the bigger themes of the whole book (Ali in relation to African Gods, for example), a significance which can only come into being with the wisdom of hindsight. It is only in the light of the outcome of the fight that a particular punch can definitely become a crucial and significant event. When it occurs we can interpret it as a possibly crucial event, but cannot know what its significance will be in terms of outcome. What appears to have happened in the written commentary is that a series of good right-hand punches during which Ali first established himself as a surprisingly strong contender have been amalgamated into one punch which is described in almost mythical terms as the hero of the written piece makes his spiritual début. The language used to describe Ali’s punch establishes him, not simply as an equal fighter, but as the winner to be. The written commentary makes no bones about this. The reader is not kept in suspense by an even-handed description of the fighters and the to and fro action of the fight, rather the story is one of the way the hero won the fight. This final aspect of contrast between the texts brings us back to the sense of distance versus immediacy noted at the outset of the section. The contrast is provided not only by the details of language, such as tense, but also by a broader difference in authorial stance. In the spoken commentary the author of the discourse is in a sense powerless in the face of the realities of the action. He may make evaluative statements, but these take second place to description of action. Second, and more significantly, he is creating the discourse in ‘real-time’, and at the point of authorship does not know future events which relate to the present he is talking about. In this way his linguistic choices are limited by several factors such as the pressure to speak fluently and articulately (as noted above, this variety of speaking rarely shows the hesitation and filler material or the false starts which characterise much conversational language); and is prompted to say certain things by the actions going on before him. This contrasts to the creator of the written commentary who not only has the benefit of contemplation, planning and editing which the channel allows, but also has the opportunity to shape the discourse into an artistic whole on the basis of the outcome of events. Before moving on to discuss the implications of these differences in the context of the wider debate about spoken and written language a more detailed linguistic comparison of the texts will be given to show the actual ‘texture’ of the discourse, and how this may relate to the general impressions given above.


Figure 4.1 Nouns in lexical set associated with boxing

Detailed comparison In this section I look at a section of the pair of commentaries and analyse it in terms of lexical and syntactic contrasts. Lexical contrasts For each sample a preliminary count can be made for lexis attributable to the topic being dealt with, which can be termed the ‘lexical set’. The lexical set for the nouns in the two texts is shown in Figure 4.1 and that for the verbs in Figure 4.2. As would be expected, given the shared topic, there is a degree of shared lexis between the nouns in the texts: round punch lead left. However, considering the fact that the two texts are about precisely the same events within the field, the high number of non-shared items is interesting (items shown with question marks indicate uncertainty as to whether they strictly belong to the lexical set associated with boxing). Within the lexical set relating to boxing most of the nouns appear in the spontaneous spoken commentary, and the majority of the verbs in the written. Furthermore, of the nine noun types found in the spoken version seven


Figure 4.2 Verbs in lexical set associated with boxing

are synonyms for ‘punch’: punch right-hand hook uppercut jab lead left. On the other hand, there is less diversity in this synonym group in the written, with only four words for punch, all but one of which are subsumed by the spoken set (all if we count ‘right’ with ‘right-hand'). There is also contrast evident when the modification of the nouns is considered, with the written showing more evaluative language as opposed to physical description. Thus in the spoken commentary only one of the nouns in the lexical set is modified by an evaluative adjective: ‘vicious hook’ (although ‘light left’ might also imply evaluation), whereas in the written there are the following: tentative left lightning-strong right high-powered punch. All the verbs in the total set collocate or are associated with ‘punch’, the main contrast between the texts being that the spoken uses only one such verb (and then it is in its non-finite form ‘leading’) as opposed to the four strongly associated with boxing found in Sample 25a (the written): feint throw


punch deliver and the verb ‘hit’—less limited to the topic—in two forms. Thus an initial conclusion about the language of the texts is that, within a key set of lexical items on a topic, differences in the balance and presentation of information can be predicted. In the spoken commentary there is a higher incidence of noun types, and a greater diversity; conversely, in the written there is both a higher incidence and greater diversity of verb types. It may also be said that a contrast exists in terms of the level of generality, with the spoken commentary using more precise terms for actions (jab; hook; uppercut) as opposed to the less specific terms of the written (punch; left; right). Furthermore, there is the tendency for more evaluation in the written commentary, and this is shown not only in sections of evaluative language woven into the action but also at the level of noun premodification. These features in turn may be ascribed to the particular circumstances under which the two texts were produced. That is to say, the speaker could see the actual actions taking place, and could report them accurately whereas the writer of a post hoc account cannot recapture the ‘blow-by-blow’ details of the action. The writer is therefore thrown back on the verb diversification (feint; throw; deliver) to convey variety in the events, and, with the knowledge that the fight will go to Ali (against the odds), can present the actions of the final winner in heroic terms. Leaving aside the lexis particularly associated with boxing, further contrasts appear between the texts. A preliminary reading gives the impression that the vocabulary used in Sample 25, the live commentary, while it may be more technically accurate is ‘simpler’ and more day-to-day than that of Sample 25a, the written. Again, nouns and verbs will be used as the basis for comparison, starting with the verbs used to describe the actions of the two fighters. While some verbs appear in both texts (look; move; come) the majority are not shared between the texts. Furthermore, the most ‘unusual’ verbs found in the spoken are ‘bounce’ and ‘shift’ with by far the majority being common monosyllabic (in their base form) verbs (get; take; try; stop; go). In contrast to this the verbs found in Sample 25a are in many cases longer (possess; collide; repel; circle) and belong to a more heightened register (charge; veer; drive) (see Figure 4.3). A similar contrast can be found when nouns are considered. When lexis associated strongly with boxing is eliminated, very few nouns are left in the extract of the spoken commentary being considered. On the other hand, a very diverse collection of nouns, including the onomatopoeic coinage from the realm of cartoons ‘thwomp’ can be found in the written. In particular, the nouns and pronouns used as grammatical subjects to introduce the actions of the fighters in


Figure 4.3 Verbs from commentaries (not in boxing set)

Figure 4.4 Distribution of reference to fighters in spoken and written commentaries

the two forms show a contrast, and the greater diversity in the written channel is sustained (see Figure 4.4). The spoken commentary uses only three types to refer to the creators of the action (token totals are given in brackets): George (1); Ali (8); Foreman (6). And, as was suggested in the initial comparison given above, in the spoken channel the attention is shared more or less equally between the two combatants on the basis of the actions happening before the eyes of the commentator. In the written commentary of the same part of the round the fighters’ last names are also used, but Ali is given centre stage with eight occurrences as the grammatical subject (‘Ali’ (5) and ‘he’ (3)). I noted earlier that there was a greater sense of immediacy in the spoken commentary, and of distance in the written, and some linguistic justification for these intuitions can be pointed to in these lexical findings. Firstly, the lexis of the spoken is more firmly focused on the matter in hand, and secondly it does little to draw attention to itself. That is to say, the use of simple unmarked vocabulary to describe the events does not arrest the attention of the listener to remark on the language itself, but rather offers precise terms for the actions being reported. In the written commentary the fight is presented in more general and abstract terms, and the actions of the individuals take on significance beyond that of the immediate events.


Grammatical contrasts Moving on from an assessment of isolated lexical items we see even more marked contrasts in the presentation of ideas. A sample analysis of part of each text is given below, in the form of a basic grammatical parsing (see Tables 4.3 and 4.4). The left-hand column includes any linking items between related clauses and, in the case of the written, thematic linking between sentences. Table 4.3 Sample clause analysis of spoken commentary

Table 4.4 Sample clause analysis of written commentary

The spoken commentary contains many of the features which we have come to think of as typical of speech mode. The first and most noticeable aspect is the frequent omission of main verbs and the deletion of the verb ‘be’ as an auxiliary: Ali [is? moves? goes?] quickly across the round Ali [is] bouncing around. No such deletion is evident in the written version. The second most noticeable contrast is the lack of explicit linking in the spoken, with the only example being ‘like’ used as a subordinating conjunction (‘as if’ would be more standard):


Ali looks like he’s ready to go here. On the other hand, a variety of linking devices are found in the written, including the extended adverbial element at sentence initial position (Through a long unheard sigh of collective release’), the more standard comparative subordinator ‘as if and the temporal adjunct ‘then’. In both cases the strong tendency is for active clauses with the focus on one or other of the fighters as the grammatical subject. However, there is a difference in the management of these subjects. In the spoken commentary the names of the fighters are repeated in close proximity with little anaphoric linking: Ali quickly across… Ali bouncing around… George moves slow… Ali gets the first punch in… Foreman moves in slow… Ali looks like… This contrasts with the written where we see a different pattern emerging: Ali charged… He looked…he held himself…he possessed… They collided… Each veered… Ali came forward… Foreman came forward…they circled…they feinted…they moved Ali threw the first punch… Whereas in the spoken commentary the attention is divided equally between the fighters, and the aim is to convey the actions as they are carried out by each of them, in the written there is a sense of the focus being on Ali. He is the subject more often than Foreman, and the anaphoric chain (he looked → he held → he possessed) serves to place him firmly in the centre of attention. In contrast, Foreman is given only one clause where he is the single subject, and is otherwise the joint subject subsumed under the pronoun ‘they’. In this treatment of the fighters we see at grammatical level the working out of the larger difference between the texts. As was noted earlier, Mailer presents Ali as the heroic figure in a clash of the Titans, and it is therefore unsurprising that the grammatical encoding should reflect his interest. Later in the extract we see further evidence of this biased focus beginning with the lexical echoing at ‘Foreman charged…’. However, this fighter cannot take the grammatical focus for long, and the futility of his attack is reflected in the return in the next clause of Ali as grammatical subject at the start of a further pronominal chain:


Foreman charged in rage. Ali compounded the insult. He grabbed the Champion around the neck and pushed his head down, wrestled it down crudely and decisively to show Foreman he was considerably rougher than anybody warned… Summary The influence of channel can be seen in the grammatical differences between the texts. The spoken commentary is produced under severe pressure. It is a public utterance which is being broadcast to millions of viewers. Although the commentary is free from most of the hesitations and false starts which we saw in the conversational discourse, we do see the lexical error near the start with the use of the word ‘round’ in place of ‘ring’. The sequencing of the information is firmly decided by the events going on, rather than manipulated by the producer of the discourse. Conversely, the written version was created after the finish of the fight, and with the potential for considerable editing. As a result we see the highlevel structuring of the narrative to fit this outcome (the raising of one fighter to heroic status), and the lowerlevel stylistic ‘economising with the truth’ to produce a pacey and dramatic effect. We can assume that the spoken commentary presents a more accurate picture of the minutiae of events, and that the written takes some artistic licence. For example, both texts inform us of Ali’s first punch, ‘a light righthand taken on the forehead by George Foreman the Champion’ as it is described in the spoken. This becomes ‘a tentative left’ in the written, and is immediately followed by the crucial ‘lightning-strong right straight as a pole into the stunned center of Foreman’s head’. As was noted in our discussion of conversation, speakers tend only to produce what is necessary for communicating an idea, and will assume certain knowledge and schemata on the part of listeners. A similar effect can be seen in the commentary. The fact that there are two fighters in a ring fighting one another for the world title means that the commentator does not have to ‘place’ the discourse temporally. The deletion of auxiliary verbs leads to an omission of the tense-bearing part of the verb phrase: Foreman [is? was? had been? will be?] slightly confused with that righthand lead. The default tense, the ‘understood’ tense, is the present tense and it is only when he steps from this temporal space that the commentator needs to fill out the verb phrase: ‘that right-hand lead which I haven’t seen too many times before’. In contrast to this, the written text has full verb phrases, and the dominant tense is past. There is, furthermore, greater variation in the tense and aspect in the written:


simple past: past continuous: present continuous: past perfect: simple present:

Ali came forward one exclamation was leaping He’s hitting him with rights Ali had not punched with such authority in seven years Champions do not hit other champions with right-hand leads

This variation is further evidence of the ‘crafted’ nature of the written as opposed to the spontaneous commentary, as the writer is able to shift the temporal focus as part of the structuring of the presentation of events. Analysis of dialogue in Under the Volcano: novel versus soundtrack The following texts are taken from two versions of Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Sample 26 is the original dialogue from the novel, and Sample 26a is a transcription made from the screen version directed by John Huston. One of the problems for producers of dialogue for the medium of screen is the removal of any authorial voice to assist with the understanding of what is being said, for example the impression the author wishes to give of a character, information about past events relating to the present situation, the relations between characters and so on. As was noted earlier in our discussion of conversational structure (see pp. 20–3), speakers tend to be economical with the information they convey, usually relying on their listener to ask for clarification if they do not understand. The author of a written dialogue is in the position to put a reader ‘in the picture’ and therefore, potentially at least, dialogue that is written to be read, rather than to be heard, may in this sense be closer to spontaneous dialogue. That is to say, the surrounding narrative in a dialogue that is written to be read can provide context to the utterances of the characters in a more explicit way than can be achieved by the film medium. The short extracts from the two versions of Under the Volcano lend some support to this notion. Initial comparison These extracts are taken from a key conversation in the novel, where the dipsomaniac Consul talks at length to his po-faced neighbour, Mr Quincey. The film treatment of their conversation has been criticised for the superficiality lent to this significant incident in the novel. However, it could be argued that since the essence of the conversation is one of misinterpretation and multiple interpretation (the men speak across one another, and this lack of communication comically supports the sense of isolation of the central character), the problem for the film maker is (a) which interpretation to convey and (b) how to present something explicable for the viewer in the film medium.


Sample 26

Dr Livingstone, I presume Hicket Ah, good morning, Quincey What’s good about it? I saw you from over there… I was just out inspecting my jungle, don’t you know You are doing what? And I’m afraid it really is a jungle too in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger What’s that? On a tiger I expect so, […] Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too… Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you’d mind being sick on your own side of the fence? Hicket […] Hicket […] Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely this damned hiccups — So I observe And the funny thing is I scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan water all night… By the way; how did you manage to survive the ball? (UV Chapter 5 [dialogue extracted]) Sample 26a Ah, good morning Quincey! What’s good about it? I’ve just been inspecting my paradise. I half expected to see Adam come riding out of it on a tiger. On a what? On a tiger I would imagine lots of tigers and pink elephants too. About your cat… I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Eden, finding a path back to our origins, perhaps I’ll go and live among the Indians like William Blackstone, stripped of useless trappings, unaccommodated man the thing itself, you know about Blackstone? My wife and I are kept awake half the night with its infernal howling or don’t you even… (Author’s data) The simplification of antagonism The approach taken in the film is to simplify the relationship to one of mismatched topic and straightforward antagonism on the part of Quincey. In the novel the neighbour’s questioning is balanced by authorial comment such as the


following description of his thoughts in the form of apparent first-person thoughts on the part of Quincey: I know all about it because I am God, and even when God was much older than you are he was nevertheless up at this time and fighting it, if necessary, while you don’t even know whether you’re up or not yet, and even if you have been out all night you are certainly not fighting it, as I would be, just as I would be ready to fight anything or anybody else too, for that matter, at the drop of a hat! (Lowry 1977:136) Taken without this authorial commentary, Quincey’s contributions to the dialogue could seem merely bewildered, rather than exasperated and holier-thanthou. Equally, his icy politeness of ‘Might I ask you if the next time… you’d mind being sick on your own side of the fence?’ could lack irony, if presented without the surrounding narrative. In the screen version Quincey is made more overtly aggressive, to make up for the lack of commentary. Speaking without an authorial presence The eventual spoken channel of the film presents a problem for the screenplay writer. The language has to convey both the ideas and information of the original, together with sufficient additional context for the listener to comprehend matters. The present text presents particular difficulty since the novel is at pains to put the reader in something of the position of the neighbour who is wrong-footed by the Consul’s train of thought, that is to say, we are not intended to understand what is going on as we read (although we may make sense of things at a later stage). Detailed comparison The simplification of this ambiguity is seen both at discourse level and in the changed lexis. Discourse contrasts The novel version opens with a cliché on the part of Quincey as he greets the Consul from his well-tended garden and regards him ‘distastefully’: Dr Livingstone, I presume. The choice of allusion is significant, since the Consul has just been fighting his way through an overgrown garden in search of a bottle of tequila he had hidden there previously. Furthermore, he has been overwhelmed with nostalgia for a traditional England by the sight of Quincey’s well-cultivated garden:


…the green lawns of the American…swept down parallel with his own briars. Nor could any English turf have appeared smoother or lovelier… (Lowry 1977:135) This cliché places the neighbour firmly in a tradition not only of Victorian values by connotation, but also of predictable discourse-moves in conversational terms. The extreme conventionality of the neighbour is reflected in his preference for jaded language, such as the common retort ‘what’s good about it’, the references to ‘plenty tigers, plenty elephants’ with its overtones of colonial discourse, and his claim that he would fight anything or anybody ‘at the drop of a hat’. Just prior to their meeting, there is a section in which the progression of the Consul’s drunken thoughts revolve around the words ‘what he wanted …’ (Lowry 1977:133–4) and the first stage in this is that he wanted to talk to someone, which crystalises as wanting ‘an opportunity to be brilliant’, at which point he catches sight of Quincey in the neighbouring garden and forms the desire to reach him. The desire to be brilliant becomes on reflection a need to be admired and then to be loved. These then move on to a less metaphysical desire for a drink, and eventually to go to the brothel in Parián. Some remnants of the desire to be conversationally brilliant can be seen in the novel version of the dialogue which ensues, and the longings to be admired and loved as a genius contrast with the actual dismissive and irritated responses of the neighbour. The conversation which follows immediately ‘loses’ Quincey in the allusions to a jungle, Rousseau and tigers. The authorial comments in the novel convey the idea that Quincey is not troubled that he cannot follow the ramblings of a drunk. In fact, on reflection, the thread of the Consul’s speech springs directly from his interlocutor’s opening and is not illogical:—Livingstone → jungle → Rousseau → tiger. Furthermore, in terms of ‘normal’ conversational interaction the Consul responds adequately to the American’s greeting with a greeting: Hicket. Ah, good morning, Quincey marred only by the inexplicable first word. The staid neighbour challenges this in the form of another cliché: What’s good about it? Thus, from the opening exchange in the novel, the nature of the two men is underlined: the Consul attempts supporting moves and in his own terms a brilliant conversation, but slips into the inexplicable (for the reader because of ‘hicket’ which can only be understood by reference back to the previous scene, and guesswork, and for the fictional interlocutor because he is unable, and unwilling, to follow the thread of the Consul’s thoughts); and his neighbour cannot step beyond the predictable. The conversation seems illstarred from the first. The equivalent material in the screen version simplifies this exchange to an opening move by the Consul, followed by a challenge from his neighbour:


Consul (opening greeting): Quincey (challenge):

Ah, good morning Quincey What’s good about it?

Here, it is the Consul who strikes up the conversation, with perhaps uncharacteristic bonhomie, and the neighbour who responds with immediate aggression. In Sample 26 (the novel version) the Consul proceeds to expand on the jungle motif suggested to his less than sober mind by the ‘Dr Livingstone’ of Quincey’s casual remark: …inspecting my jungle…it really is a jungle too… Rousseau…tiger. His listener is bewildered and responds with irritated questioning moves, doing little to hide his contempt: You are doing what?… What’s that? culminating in his belief that the Consul has been or is about to be sick. Again the Consul responds with owlish politeness, and finally gives the reader an explanation of the inexplicable ‘hicket’: Hicket […] Hicket […] Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely this [sic] damned hiccups In Sample 26a (the screen version) the Consul is in fact less constructive in conversational terms, and his neighbour’s tetchy bewilderment is understandable. In the spoken channel version, he greets the neighbour and then goes off at a tangent first about the jungle, and then about Blackstone, with no excuse in the form of an allusion by his neighbour to a jungle explorer. This has the effect of making him seem in control of his discourse in a way which contrasts with the novel version. In the latter, his thoughts are sparked off by allusions within the conversation and its setting in a way that reflects actual speech rather more accurately than the screen version. The dialogue discourse in the written channel is dependent on other written discourse, the surrounding authorial comments and the preceding events for its significance to be brought out. The dialogue prepared for delivery in the spoken channel, despite the visual medium of film, must stand alone and make sense to a listener without overt cues in supporting written text. For example, before dismissing as dipsomaniac hallucination the allusion to Rousseau which he cannot understand, in the novel Quincey is said to look at the Consul with ‘the cold sardonic eye of the material world’, and although an actor might be able to look sardonic it is difficult to convey such a precise noun phrase in a look.


Much of the tragi-comedic quality of the book hinges on the mismatch of the Consul’s spiritually charged, if drunken, world view and hard facts which in the end he cannot escape. Although the self-assured and conventional neighbour and his disapproving stance are not difficult to convey on film, his qualities have to be brought out by means of additional contributions in the screen version on the topic of the cat. More fundamentally, the sad and hilarious juxtaposition of the Consul’s desire to be a brilliant speaker who is admired and loved with the actual conversation which ensues cannot be conveyed. In the written channel it is possible for the author to show us the thoughts of a character, thoughts which cannot be expressed in the spoken channel without difficulty. For example, the section revolving around the words ‘what he wanted’, which contextualises the subsequent dialogue and gives it point would transfer uneasily to the spoken channel. One possibility would be a third-person narrator speaking over the actions to give the Consul’s thoughts as he searches in the garden: …what he wanted, he now saw very clearly, was to talk to someone: that was necessary: but it was more, merely, than that; what he wanted involved something like the grasping, at this moment, of a brilliant opportunity, or more accurately, of an opportunity to be brilliant. (Lowry 1977:133) The problem with a voice-over is that, however anonymous the deliverer of the words, the physical presence of the voice creates a secondary ‘character’ for the listener with the power to read the mind of the central figure in the action. This in turn leads to a diversion of attention from the importance of the leading individual as the focus for the scene. For although the talk would be about that figure, the act of spoken narration places a frame or barrier between the audience and the character in such a way that they are distanced and made more artificial and fictional. On the other hand, the stream of inner thoughts could be translated into the first person and delivered by the Consul. However, there is a difference between private thoughts and ideas expressed in actual speech, even if only to oneself. The actual vocal expression of something like: ‘what I want is an opportunity to be brilliant’ gives an impression of absurd egoism on the part of the person delivering the words. The written channel allows a flow of non-speech in the mind of a character to be presented directly to a reader who accepts the convention that these ideas are private and non-articulated thoughts. This illusion is hard to sustain off the page and in the spoken channel, where, however sophisticated the screenplay, words must be spoken by somebody to somebody.


Figure 4.5 The Consul's noun

Figure 4.6 Quincey’s nouns

Lexical contrasts Despite the similarity between the novel version and the screen version being sufficient to recognise and match up the section of conversation in question, the radical simplification and reworking that has been undertaken can be seen in the relatively small quantity of shared lexis between the two versions. The distribution of the noun-types is shown in Figure 4.5 and Figure 4.6 where the discourse of the two speakers has been analysed separately. In both cases shared lexical items between the two texts are in the minority. Additionally, although there is the impression that the non-shared items are spread equally between the two versions (the Consul having ten different nouns in one version from the other, and Quincey having four new ones in the screen version and five different ones in the novel version), this is rather misleading since all but two of the nouns (‘paradise’ and ‘Adam’) found in the screenplay version come from new material that is inserted into the conversation in the process of telescoping a much longer and more rambling conversation in the novel. That is to say, Quincey is given lines about the cat, and the Consul lines about William Blackstone, each of which were topics which occurred later in the novel dialogue. Within the strictly comparable material the tendency is for the screenplay to reduce the lexical diversity found in the original written channel in a more general process of simplification. The potentially ‘difficult’ references to Rousseau, and Tehuacan water along with the mysterious and onomatopoeic


Figure 4.7 The Consul’s verbs

Figure 4.8 Quincey’s verbs

‘hicket’ of the Consul’s hiccups are all removed and replaced with the more coherent lexical set of ‘Adam’, ‘paradise’, ‘Eden’ and ‘a path back to our origins’. A similar process can be seen when the distribution of verbs is considered (these are shown in Figure 4.7 and Figure 4.8) where once again fewer items are shared than not, and once again all but one of the ‘new’ verbs in the screen version (‘imagine’) are accounted for by the interpolated material. When the strictly comparable material is analysed, greater diversity and more complex vocabulary is found in the written channel. In particular, Quincey’s language is simplified so that he ‘loses’ some of his distinctive pomposity with the elimination of the verbs ‘presume’, ‘expect’, ‘inspect’, ‘would mind’ and ‘observe’. Summary In preparing a screenplay for delivery in the spoken channel on film, the writers are removing discourse from the exclusively written channel of the novel to a new medium which must take into account the needs of viewers rather than readers. On the page the novelist has the luxury of being able to manipulate the visual presentation of spoken interaction in a way that makes it cheekily ambiguous to the reader, thus placing them in something like the position of the bewildered Quincey when faced with the eclectic and tipsy Consul. For example, we as readers may be bemused by the word ‘hicket’ until it is explained much later, and the twists and turns of the Consul’s topics (from ‘Good morning’


through ‘inspecting my jungle’ to Rousseau on his tiger to hiccups and finally the Tehuacan water and the ball of the previous evening) need concentration to follow them. The skill of this writing is that it generates confusion and makes the reader an active participant who may feel a shared perspective with the puzzled Quincey and his repeated questions: What’s good about it? You are doing what? What’s that? The transference of the discourse into the medium of speech on film presents the screenplay writer with a dilemma: how can this subtle interaction between the audience of the discourse and their deliberate confusion be sustained? This realist screenplay does not attempt to carry the interplay across into the spoken channel for the listening and viewing audience. Whether the film medium has the potential to sustain this level of sophistication in the playing off of created discourse against audience perspectives is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, the detailed analysis of the changes which are made in preparing novel dialogue for delivery on the screen returns us to the question of spoken mode and written mode. The tendency for greater simplicity and predictability of cohesive linking both at a discourse level and at the level of lexis means that the screen version is superficially closer to the norms of conversation. Yet there are several features of the novel dialogue which mirror spoken mode very accurately. Whereas the screen version must concentrate the matter of the conversation (Blackstone, the cat, and eventually Yvonne, the Consul’s estranged wife) into the conventional limits of a film scene, the novel version has the expansiveness and rambling quality of actual talk as it extends over more than four pages. In addition, the discourse contains evidence of indications to an actual context of production, similar to those found in real conversation. The Consul speaks of ‘over there’, and ‘this…hiccups’, Quincey refers to the fence they are speaking over, and uses the self-referential term ‘So I observe.’ By contrast, the screen version is more detached from the context in which it is presented, with all the topics introduced being explicit referents beyond the immediate setting (apart from ‘my paradise’, and even this has a higher metaphorical content than ‘my jungle’). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Speech and writing usually take place in very different contexts. These contexts can be described both in terms of the context of production and the influence of the context of reception. In the case of the spoken and written commentaries on a sports event the significant contextual factor was the time constraint on the language producers. Whilst both texts were shaped by the events on which the commentary was made, the context of the spoken discourse permits little creative


reworking or evaluation of events since the speaker cannot know the ultimate outcome of the event. The written commentary contains much summarising and amalgamation of actions, and that which is seen as significant is strongly influenced by the knowledge on the part of the writer of the whole event. These contextual influences are reflected in the syntax and lexis of the discourse, with the spoken channel showing a high level of ellipsis, precision of terms for actions, a low incidence of evaluative discourse and a tendency for simple vocabulary strongly associated with the matter in hand. On the other hand, certain liberties were taken with the presentation of events in the written, and the tendency was for more generalised vocabulary for actions, complete sentences, diversity of tenses, and generally more complex vocabulary. Turning to the comparison of the same dialogue in a novel and translated into the spoken channel for the screen, here the context of reception of the two samples was significant. In the written channel the dialogue is supported by other written text in the form of both the wider context of the surrounding chapter, and more specifically in the form of authorial comment. The dialogue on screen tended towards greater simplicity and conventionality, but in the process a great deal of the sophistication and point of the dialogue was lost. The process of simplification was reflected in the lexis, with the novel version having greater diversity and obscurity of reference. This led to a superficial similarity between the screen version and actual speech. Nevertheless, other features in the novel version, for example reference to things within the sight of the speakers, showed more similarity to actual speech taking place in a real context. This chapter has looked at the influence of the context of samples of text from the two channels. The question of context raises several important issues which have not been addressed directly in this discussion, for example, the relationship between genre and context or between register and context, quite apart from the issue of what counts as context for a given sample. In addition, there is room for more discussion of the peculiarities of these texts and how typical they are of their kind. The nature of speech and writing limits their potential to appear in the same contexts and these differences have an influence on the kind of language which is produced. For example, the time it takes to write and read discourse means that the written channel is not well-suited to producing a commentary on live action. Equally, the fact of speech carries with it an element of performance which it is hard to separate from the individual who is speaking. This was brought up in the discussion of the use of a narrative voice in the written channel as opposed to the spoken channel. However, a question remains which relates to the differences between a narrator and a commentator, and why a narrator has certain creative powers and a role of importance which is not assigned to a commentator. This in turn brings up the issue of the status of fictional created discourse and whether different contextual factors are salient for such material. In the discussions presented in this book, the special status, if any, of created discourse has not been mooted, and real samples of conversation have been


placed beside created ones as if there was no problem of comparison. Rather, the aim has been both to bring out contrasts between discourse in the two channels and to raise awareness of how writers are both limited and liberated by the medium in which they work. Once again, at the end of this discussion, we are returned to the issue of comparability which has been central throughout this book. Despite the difficulties of comparing speech and writing, and of comparing real discourse with fictional, the retention of the nature of channel at the heart of the study provides insights, and, it is hoped, starting-points for further comparative work either in literature or linguistics, which a straightforward textual comparison cannot. EXERCISES Task:

Analyse the grammatical structures and lexis in the following texts and discuss whether they support the conclusions given earlier in this chapter. Sample 27 is from the live spoken commentary of the same fight analysed above, and Sample 27a is from the written version in The Fight by Norman Mailer, with the relevant sections extracted. Sample 27

Here’s some real good shots thrown to the body by Foreman Foreman on the left of your screen, Ali on the right Ali leans up against the rope Right-hand taken on the gloves by Ali There’s a real wild right-hand taken on the back of the head of Ali Foreman with a wild right again Ali looks like he’s trying to rest in this round, punches are not doing any damage though Vicious right thrown at the body of Ali, wild right misses the head of Ali, a left taken on the glove of Ali, the right glove Foreman pouring, pouring, pouring, trying to set them up to the body Ali does look tired now, Foreman seems to be coming back with more speed One minute left in round five, this is George Foreman’s round all the way Ali, this is a cruising round for him Foreman just working the body, hasn’t hit Ali except once in the face (..) A combination by Ali, lands on the head of Foreman Foreman with that right hook Ali backs up Foreman


(Author’s transcript) Sample 27a With Ali backed on the ropes, as far back on the ropes as a deep-sea fisherman is backed back in his chair when setting the hook on a big strike, so Ali got ready and Foreman came on to blast him out. A shelling reminiscent of artillery battles in World War I began. Neither man moved more than a few feet in the next minute and a half. Across that embattled short space Foreman threw punches in barrages of four and six and eight and nine, heavy maniacal slamming punches, heavy as the boom of oaken doors, bombs to the body, bolts to the head, punching until he could not breathe […] And Ali, gloves to his head, elbows to his ribs, stood and swayed and was rattled and banged and shaken like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips, and the ropes shook and swung like sheets in a storm, and Foreman would lunge with his right at Ali’s chin and Ali go flying back out of reach by a half-inch […] And Ali reaching over the barrage would give a prod now and again to Foreman’s neck like a housewife sticking a toothpick in a cake to see if it is ready. (TF Chapter 14) Task: Make your own transcript of a short section of commentary on a sporting event. See if you can find a newspaper account of the same event. Analyse your samples in the way outlined in this chapter. Task:

Take a sample of dialogue from a novel or story (if possible, one which has been made into a film for which you have access to a video—one possibility would be the prose and film versions of The Dead’ by James Joyce). Extract the dialogue from its written context and consider whether this could be acted on screen without alterations. Make any alterations you consider necessary, and then compare your version with a screen version, if possible. FURTHER READING Cook, Guy (1990) ‘Transcribing infinity, problems of context presentation’, Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 1–24. Crystal, David and Davy, Derek (1969) Investigating English Style (Chapter 5, on commentary), London: Longman.


Psathas, G. and Anderson, T. (1990) ‘The “practices” of transcription in conversation analysis’, Semiotica, 78, 75–99. Rader, Margaret (1982) ‘Context in written language: the case of imaginative fiction’, in Tannen, Deborah (ed.) Spoken and Written Language: exploring orality and literacy, Advances in Discourse Processes, vol. IX, Norton, NJ: Ablex. Redd, T.M. (1991) ‘The voice of time: the style of narration in a newspaper magazine’, Written Communication, 8, 240–58. Simpson, P. (1993) Language, Ideology and Point of View, London: Routledge. Toolan, M. (1988) Narrative: a critical linguistic introduction, London: Routledge.

Chapter 5 Issues in the study of speech and writing

INTRODUCTION This chapter aims to bring a more overtly theoretical perspective to the study of speech and writing than has been the case in the previous chapters. It is intended to raise awareness of the problematic status of speech and writing in the study of language, and as such is perhaps more suited to advanced students, or those who wish to move on to tackle some of the underlying issues in the field. However, it also presents a contextualising background of previous approaches to speech and writing for the more general reader. The rest of this chapter is in two parts. The first section presents a summary of previous approaches to the subject of the relationship between spoken and written forms of language from a theoretical perspective. The second discusses more empirically based research in the field. While the distinction between theoretical and empirical approaches is not always as clearcut as this opposition suggests, I am using it in order to present the broad differences in perspective in this field. THEORETICAL APPROACHES Among those who I am grouping together as presenting a theoretically based account of the relationship between spoken and written forms of language are those who form rational hypotheses about the relationship on the basis of what they believe to be true about the two forms of language, rather than examining samples of language as their starting point. While some examples of language use may be included in their expositions, such examples serve to support an a priori theory. In the group are many of the most influential figures of linguistics. I shall be dealing with them in three stages. First, those who, like Ferdinand de Saussure or Leonard Bloomfield, discuss the speech versus writing issue in the context of the larger question of what constitutes the proper object of study in linguistics, and who conclude that writing is a subsidiary form of language. Second, I move on to linguists such as M.A.K.Halliday or Josef Vachek who give more weight to the actual manifestations of speech and writing, and who

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generally see the two forms as complementary systems. Third, I deal with scholars who have presented theories about the social functions and influence of speech as opposed to writing. Among these I include both linguists such as David Olson, and social scientists like W.J. Ong or Jack Goody, as well as the Classical scholars Lord and Havelock. I shall be suggesting that a common theme in this group is an overemphasis on the effects of the written word. Speech supreme There is a fundamental assumption in the study of language that the spoken form is primary, and the written form a means of representing that primary form. This view stems mainly from the work of a highly influential linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, who memorably claimed that choosing to study writing was like choosing to study a photograph of a person rather than the real thing. Despite this derogatory claim about writing, there is in the work of Saussure a degree of inconsistency in his attitude to the status of writing. This inconsistency underpins many of the difficulties in studying speech and writing. On the one hand, ‘A language is a repository of sound patterns and writing in their tangible form’ (Saussure 1983:15)1 which would suggest that writing serves an important function. Not only does it ‘represent’ a language (Saussure 1983:25), it also presents us with a record of the sound patterns of a language in a form that is amenable to study. On the other hand, Saussure frequently presents writing as, at best, a convenient repository of linguistic facts in the case of dead languages; and at worst as a dangerous diversion from the study of la langue. Whilst recognising, and fulminating against, the influence of writing and its compelling presence, Saussure did not see it as worthy of synchronic study. In this discussion I shall be suggesting that this attitude to the status of writing as both the tangible record of language and as something misleadingly different from it leads to inconsistencies. Saussure’s own arguments against the independent life of writing are a product of his belief that the ‘sole reason’ (Saussure 1983:24) for its existence is for it to represent ‘a language’. He dismisses the idea of studying writing for its own sake with a persuasive image: It is rather as if people believed that in order to find out what a person looks like it is better to study his photograph than his face. (Saussure 1983:24–5). Indeed, it is the tangible aspect of writing which gives it its undesirable potency and influence. The existence of writing provides an ‘easy option’ for linguistic study, and therefore, in Saussure’s opinion, is a dangerous red-herring for linguists. Writing should not deflect the attention of scholars of language from the true object of study in linguistics, that is to say, the system of signs which is la langue. Under no circumstances should the ease of perceiving the written sign

126 ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF SPEECH AND WRITING

lead one to think that it is anything but an ‘artificial unit’ (Saussure 1983:26). The point of the photograph comparison is not only that the image might be inaccurate (it could be flattering, out of date, unflattering), but it also implies that no representation should be substituted for the real face. That is to say, no representations of la langue will be acceptable. This theoretical issue leads to methodological problems. For analysis of language (whether conceived of as an abstract system, or as language in use) depends on our ability to describe or capture it in some form of graphic representation. A strong statement of Saussure’s case leads us to the conclusion that analysis of la langue is impossible. A further key concept in Saussure’s theories of language is parole, (the actual examples of speech as used by people, rather than the more abstract system, la langue). However, the real object of interest for Saussure was the latter, higher and more abstract system of signs. The relationship between two pseudo-forms of language, parole and the written form (in terms of this book: speech and writing), Saussure would argue, should not be of interest to those studying language. Nevertheless, the question of what is the nature of the links between all three elements in the triangle—the language system, speech and writing—has remained at the centre of linguistic theory. If one retains the concept of ‘language’ as an abstract system one can produce models which have advantages of elegance and power, such as transformational grammar. However, for these to be acceptable they must at some point ‘connect up’ with naturally occurring language, the words we speak or the books we read. On the other hand, abandoning the theoretical and depending on real spoken words and real written texts brings with it its own difficulties: if one concentrates on analysing examples of actual speech/writing the power and universality of the description is greatly reduced. In the case of the former it can be argued that the model, however internally consistent, may not reflect reality; in the case of the latter, empirical, approach the criticism is that it has limited power, and sheds light on one (possibly atypical) area of language use. To sum up, a language and the form it is written in were, for Saussure, two distinct systems. The written form was not part of the language but was a means of making manifest the sound system that makes up la langue. The graphic and permanent nature of writing serves to give it an impression of independent existence. According to this approach, this tangibility and degree of independence does not make writing a separate form of language that is suitable for linguistic study, rather it provides a false object of study. Why was there such firmness in the work of Saussure that writing should be excluded from study in linguistics? There were two main reasons, other than historical pressures in the development of language study in general. First, the fact that writing is in important ways not like parole. Second, the nature of the written form undermines the basic tenets of Saussure’s theory. The arguments which Saussure used to exclude naturally occurring speech from linguistics are firmly grounded in the means of production and do not


necessarily hold good for writing. Unlike parole (actual language as spoken by people), which can be dismissed as transient, unpredictable and idiosyncratic, writing is permanent, and, in its literary, printed form highly standardised (see Chapter 3 for a further discussion of this). The definitive aspects of parole are that it is subject to the whim of the individual and that it is affected by ancillary or accidental factors (Saussure 1983:14), such as the context in which the speech occurs. Writing, on the other hand, if it is idiosyncratic and context-dependent soon loses its communicative value. It is interesting to substitute the word ‘writing’ for la langue in some of the definitions and descriptions of it given in the Cours: It can be localised in that particular section of the speech circuit where sound patterns are associated with concepts. It is the social part of language, external to the individual, who by himself is powerless either to create it or to modify it. It exists only in virtue of a kind of contract agreed between the members of a community …It is quite separate from speech: a man who loses the ability to speak none the less retains his grasp of [it]. (Saussure 1983:14) Furthermore, it ‘is an object that may be studied independently’; it is ‘homogeneous’ in nature, and is a structured system. These aspects of la langue could be applied to the written form of language far more easily than to the spoken. Of course, this does not mean that writing actually is la langue. However, given the fact that by nature writing more a pseudo-langue than is parole, it is unsurprising that such emphasis should be placed on its denigration. In order for speech to retain its prime status in Saussure’s theory, writing had to be described as, simultaneously, sound-pattern-written-down (which, I shall be arguing, does not work at anything but the most general level), and a ‘false’ form of language. The notion of a system of language consisting of a priori forms is anathema to Saussure’s science of semiotics. For this reason, I suggest, writing was dismissed as merely reflecting and representing speech and as a pseudoparole.2 This feature of linguistics returns me to the question of precisely what Saussure was referring to when he discusses writing. The question hinges upon the nature of representation through writing. Does writing represent sounds or does it represent concepts? Saussure’s complex delineation of the linguistic sign points to the fact that it represents both. That is to say, writing is the tangible manifestation of la langue which is a system of mutually defining linguistic signs. Since the sign is dual in nature and is comprised of a united sound pattern and concept, any system which makes it manifest must be representing both aspects. However, throughout the Cours the phonic (sound) aspect of the written is given prominence. In Saussure’s remarks on orthography, as indeed in most people’s, it is the lack of a ‘fit’ between the sounds of speech and the graphemes on paper which


vex him, and lead him to state that writing ‘obscures our view’ (Saussure 1983: 29) of la langue. He goes as far as to ‘quarantine’ any changes in a language that can be traced back to the influence of the written form. He gives the example of an intrusive [b] being introduced into the name ‘Lefevre’ due to the influence of ‘learned’ Latin spelling, and argues that such changes should be kept separate from true changes which were due to ‘natural evolution’.3 However, there is an inconsistency in this. For, first, the alphabetic guise of a sign written down is supposed to be arbitrary: ‘The signs used in writing are arbitrary. The letter t, for instance, has no connexion with the sound it denotes’ (Saussure 1983:117). Second, by criticising the inconsistencies of some soundgrapheme relations in alphabetic writing Saussure is implying that there could be a better means of graphically representing sound patterns, and that some of the relations are more acceptable. Taken to its conclusion, this would mean that la langue could be made manifest in an idealised visual way. However, Saussure would be extremely loath to accept that, say, the modern phonetic alphabet could serve this function. Above, I argued that many of the distinguishing features of la langue were shared by writing. I pointed to high-level parallels, such as the social aspect of acceptable writing. It is also the case that written words and Saussure’s definitions of linguistic signs share many of their important distinguishing features. In particular, the notion that the linguistic sign combines sound pattern with concept in an indissoluble bonded form. Later in the Cours, Saussure accepts that direct study of linguistic signs is impossible, and returns to dealing with the word: ‘Since we cannot have direct access to concrete entities and linguistic units, we shall take words as examples’ (Saussure 1983:112). I would argue that, for Saussure, words boil down to visual signs (Saussure 1983:102ff). Whether or not the visual aspect of the word is accepted, it remains the case that detailed analysis of language, and discussion of language between linguists, cannot be carried out, by Saussure or anyone else, without some recourse to the graphic medium.4 What generally has not been addressed is the effect of writing on the object of study, a point I shall return to below. As long as one accepts that the sole function of writing is to represent speech, two interconnected facts are the case. First, it is possible to ignore a system of language (i.e. writing) which largely avoids the criticisms directed at parole. Second, the written examples of ‘string-based’ grammars become acceptable in a science which accepts the primacy of speech. Without holding the notion that writing is speech written down, and that speech is a product of some higher, decontextualised system, the analysis of language through isolated, written sentences would seem limited, to say the least. However, if writing is made up of an independent system of signs, and is not subject to the vagaries of parole in what sense is it not a worthy object for linguistic study? In fact, despite the exhortations to the contrary, written language has never ceased to be studied, if for no other reason than that:


The written form of a word strikes us as a permanent, solid, object and hence more fitting than its sound to act as a linguistic unit persisting through time. (Saussure 1983:26) I have dealt with the approach adopted by Saussure in some detail because it presents clearly the fundamental and far-reaching questions that arise when discussing the relationship of writing to speech, for example whether the primary function of writing is to convey speech sounds or whether it is a largely independent system. For, if ‘writing which reproduces the phonemes of speech is as intelligible as speech’ (as Bloomfield states when arguing for spelling reform to bring orthography in line with modern speech sounds; Bloomfield 1935:502), the alterations made in, say, a verbatim transcription cannot be put down to the change in channel per se. If, on the other hand, writing is a language system which by now is complementary to speech (i.e. fulfilling those functions that are least well carried out in speech, such as listing things, or keeping records), and independent of it, it would be surprising to find no alterations made. I have highlighted a dualism in Saussure’s treatment of writing, and suggested that this has important implications for the study of language in general. With his deep suspicion of the written form of language, Saussure set the general trend in theoretical linguistics away from concrete manifestations of language. His notion of the ‘natural evolution’ of a language, free from artificial interference, places it firmly in non-empirical territory. Further-more, his insistence that it is a mistake to proceed from forms to meaning moved the study of language from the real to the ideal. I shall now move on to other theorists who shared many of the attitudes expressed by Saussure towards writing. In the following paragraphs I shall be arguing that the view of writing as merely a means of recording sounds is difficult to support. In particular, I hope to show that a linguistic science that refuses to acknowledge the importance of the written form of language and at the same time proposes to study speech must face the inconsistencies that this leads to. Written forms of language were famously denigrated by Leonard Bloomfield. Not only did he regard writing as simply a means of recording language and not an independent form of language (Bloomfield 1935:21, 282f), it is also clear that he saw the writing-speech relationship in terms of a straightforward, mechanical process: ‘The art of writing is not part of language, but rather a comparatively modern invention for recording and broadcasting what is spoken’ (Bloomfield 1942). This presents writing as a sound recording mechanism, a comparison that is made explicit, for Bloomfield states that writing is like a ‘phonograph’ or ‘radio’.5 The only useful function of writing is, as for Saussure, that it provides a fossilisation of earlier sounds in a language and is therefore useful for diachronic studies. In his emphatic rejection of the idea of writing as anything other than subsidiary to speech, he goes so far as to deny the generally accepted view of


ideographic writing systems, stating that the characters do not reflect the ‘ideas’, but they represent features of ‘the writers’ language’ (Bloomfield 1935:285).6 Bloomfield’s arguments for the primacy of speech are that it precedes writing chronologically in both the history of peoples and a person;7 that there exist nonliterate language communities; that it is an arbitrary representation of a language; that deciphering written records is impossible without prior knowledge of language; that written forms hinder rather than help our understanding of ‘actual speech’ (Bloomfield 1935:21), and that alphabetic writing is a ‘poor guide’ to the underlying phonemes (Bloomfield 1935:79). Each of these statements begs the question of whether writing could be an independent system of signs. If alphabetic writing were not fundamentally designed to represent phonemes, but rather was an encoding of concepts which has the potential to be read aloud, then the fact that it is a poor reflection of phonemes would be neither surprising, nor worrying. Bloomfield decries the influence of standardising, ‘literary’ language on speech through what he sees as the tyranny of written orthography (Bloomfield 1935:486ff). However, despite being such a handicap the written form of a language is said to have no independence from the sounds of a language:8 Actually, the writer utters the speech-form before or during the act of writing and the hearer utters it in the act of reading; only after considerable practice do we succeed in making these speech-movements inaudible and inconspicuous. (Bloomfield 1935:285) But there is a paradox here. Given the fact that writing is accused of ‘fixing’ sounds from earlier forms of the language (and therefore disguising the true sounds present in a language), which sounds are readers ‘uttering’ when they read? If a reader utters the sounds indicated by the graphemes would they be uttering all the inconsistent and archaic sounds that orthography contains? Or would they be uttering their own phonemic patterns? Surely, the latter. If not, we are in the position of accepting that readers utter one, obsolete set of sounds as they read, but which they simultaneously recognise as the sound patterns they are familiar with. On the other hand, if we deny the vocalisation aspect of reading in proficient readers many of the problems concerning inconsistency vanish. Without the phonic potential being emphasised written words can be seen as visual ‘labels’ which direct a reader to generate a meaning based on their linguistic (and other) knowledge. The written form may, of course, be uttered, but its primary purpose is not for it to be reconstituted as sound.9 However, the idea of writing having a function other than to represent speech sounds leads back to the question of the relationship between speech and writing in linguistics, even if indirectly. The problem is as follows. As long as writing is a direct representation of speech it is possible to ‘downgrade’ its status since it is a system made up of ‘parasitic formations’ (Lotz 1951), or signs of signs. If


writing is not dependent on speech sounds then its separate system must be taken into account in a description of language. The removal of the object of study to the level of abstractions such as ‘la langue’ or ‘competence’ does not entirely solve this problem. First because, as noted by Saussure, the very existence of a written, prestigious form of language can, potentially, affect these abstract systems. Indeed, it could be argued that native-speaker intuitions about wellformedness are influenced by the norms of writing (a point that I shall be discussing in more detail below). Bloomfield himself makes a similar point in his article on the effects of literate language: ‘The popular explanation of incorrect language is simply the explanation of incorrect writing’ [original emphasis] (Bloomfield 1927). Second, the analysis of a language cannot be carried out without the medium of writing. This last point has implications for linguistic theory. There are three, related, questions. First, if writing is at best on a par with parole, or at worst a mere means of representing parole, what then is the status of the isolated written sentences (‘strings’) presented by linguists to, say, test well-formedness? Second, there is the more fundamental point that the written form of a language may affect not only native speakers’ attitudes to correctness, it may also influence our perception of the spoken form. Third, as has been seen in the previous chapters, a linguistic theory designed for context-free, static systems may not be adequate to cope with the spoken form. It is significant that, despite the admonitions of Saussure, the nature of writing and its relationship to speech has continued to be a subject for debate. It is a debate that is inevitably bound up with the nature of the object of study in linguistics. In the rest of this section I am going to discuss the question of the status of speech and writing in the work of Noam Chomsky and in particular the problem of correspondence between the language generated by a grammar and naturally occurring language. A related discussion will be on the work of linguists who have been interested in how writing conveys the sound structure of a language. In examining the work of Saussure I dealt with three main subjects, la langue, parole and writing. In Bloomfield there was seen a similar triangular system: ‘ideas’, speech and writing. In the work of both the question of the status of the written form in the field of linguistics was talked about at some length in order for it to be eliminated. In the writings of the most influential linguist since Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, the question of the nature and status of written language as opposed to speech is seen as largely irrelevant, and is never dealt with directly in any detail. I am not going to deal with his work at great length. However, if any correspondence is to be found between the sentences produced by a generative grammar and empirical language use it will be with the written form of the language, not the spoken. As I pointed out above, the result of excluding those elements most typical of speech in defining the object of linguistics is that the object, of necessity, becomes more like writing. An additional aspect of Chomsky’s work is that the grammar created itself produces


examples of ‘language’. The status of these, and their relationship to speech or naturally occurring writing is one that remains problematic. This is addressed by Terence Moore and Christine Carling in their introductory overview to Noam Chomsky: consensus and controversy: The closest parallel ordinary human language appears to offer to a set of sentences resembling those a generative grammar might produce is written texts. Setting aside obvious exceptions—poetry and experimental novels— nearly all written prose consists of sets of sentences. The obvious place to look for a correspondence between a set of sentoids of a formal language and a set of sentences in a human language is in the written form of a human language. (Moore and Carling 1987:21) This is a rather simplistic account of the nature of written texts. However, if we accept that the sentoids produced by a grammar will resemble writing more closely than naturally occurring speech we are brought back to the central issue of this book—what is the nature of the relationship between speech and writing? It is the same dilemma that was found in Saussure’s work. That is to say, the science of language would seem to deal with a form that is closer to writing than to speech. If it is to account for the mechanisms of naturally occurring speech rather than formal languages, then a central question is the possibility of relating static written language to dynamic spoken language. There are several complex problems in even beginning to discuss this issue. For example, there is the question of at what level correspondence is to be sought: phonemic, syntactic or semantic. It is at the level of the phoneme that most theoretically based accounts of the relationship have taken place. The basic assumption is that speech and writing share the same phonemes and that the alphabet is a reflection of these. In 1968 Chomsky and Halle made a break with this by coming out in favour of the much maligned spelling of English: Notice, incidentally, how well the problem of representing the sound pattern of English is solved in this case by conventional orthography… English orthography turns out to be rather close to an optimal system for spelling English. (Chomsky and Halle 1968:184n) Acceptance of the adequacy of English orthography as a representation of language is a prerequisite for a theory of language which uses the words of everyday writing in order to represent fundamental structures in the brain. The elimination of the issue of non-phonic representation in writing (the lack of ‘fit’ between sounds and letters) goes a long way to side-stepping the problem of how writing relates to speech. Furthermore, in the context of generative grammar, it provides the potential for deep structure to connect to speech.


In Chomsky’s own writings the written form of language is referred to specifically in the context of memory/processing limitations. A sentence that is incomprehensible in speech may be intelligible if repeated several times or presented on the written page, where memory limitations are less severe. (Chomsky 1980:221) and he goes on to make the analogy with the knowledge we have of mathematics in which we use pen and paper to extend our memory. He states that our ability or inability to carry out a complex computation is independent of a person’s fundamental knowledge of arithmetic: Rather, he uses the knowledge already represented in his mind, with access to more computing space than his short-term memory provides. Some computations may be too complex even for paper and pencil, but these limitations are independent of knowledge of arithmetic. They hold for other domains. Therefore a scientist interested in determining ‘arithmetical competence’ would quite properly disregard these limitations, attributing them to independent components of the mind. (Chomsky 1980:221) This brings up the issue of what is meant by speech in the first quotation from Rules and Representations. The statement is given to explain the independence of knowledge of grammar from extrinsic constraints. As such, the ‘speech’ described may be interpreted as an example of performance, and the example seems to be persuasive: we listen, we do not understand, we ask for the utterance to be repeated or, if there is some speech impediment, written down. However, what becomes clear as the arithmetic analogy is unfolded, is that the comprehension task is being seen as a computational process. The paragraph goes on: But we do not have to extend our knowledge of language to be able to deal with repeated or written sentences that are far more complex than those of normal spoken discourse. (Chomsky 1980:221) Here we seem to have ‘speech’ producing sentences too difficult to be under stood in the context of normal processing, and hypothetical sentences that are more difficult than those of ‘normal spoken discourse’ and can only be understood with an aide memoire. Rather than being speaker-dependent performance, the former (‘speech’) must be a product of a generative grammar. Indeed, if a person had produced the ‘incomprehensible’ sentence he/she, we imagine, could have understood it. Otherwise, we are in the position of speakers


producing utterances too complex even for themselves to understand without repeating them or writing them down. However, if the sentences in question are context-free sentoids why bring up the problem of real-time processing, repetition or writing? The issue of complexity is connected to that of the recursiveness of grammars. That is to say, the infinite potential for language produced from the finite set of rules represented in the brain. Moore and Carling point out that the type of sentence Chomsky is referring to would be a selfembedded sentoid such as ‘the rabbit the girl the cat ignored pursued dropped the glove’. They go on to say that these types of sentoids: …highlight the sharp difference between what is a natural output of a Chomsky grammar and what is a possible sentence of English. (Moore and Carling 1987:27n) The issue is one addressed from a different perspective by Alexander George in his paper ‘How not to become confused about linguistics’ (George 1989a). He posits a five-fold series of distinctions relating to grammar and suggests that the abstract entity which is the fundamental grammar is not causally linked to speech production or perception. He goes on to say that this view has not been generally accepted as it would turn linguistics into a non-empirical discipline ‘basically, a branch of mathematics’ (George 1989a:98).10 The issue of the potential for generalisation from empirical data is one that must be addressed in an investigation of speech and writing, whether theoretically driven or data driven. My aim was to show how without a clear and consistent definition of speech, writing and their relationship to ‘language’, the science of language will not cohere. That is to say, if it is claiming to account for the comprehension and production of naturally occurring speech via the description of an abstract entity, two preliminary theoretical questions are: (a) what is the feasibility of producing such an account by moving from the abstract and ideal towards the empirical and concrete? (b) what effect does the means of graphically representing language have on our conception of a ‘type’? More specifically, the definition of speech is of great importance in any empirical studies into speech and writing. For instance, the statement that certain genres of writing are ‘more like speech’ than others can have very little meaning without some factual basis for what is typical of speech and of writing. The independence of writing I should now like to turn to some scholars who have dealt with the relationship of speech to writing from a different perspective. Here I shall be discussing some of those who have given more credence to the independence of writing, and have also tended to present their arguments in terms of a less abstract system of ideas than those I have previously discussed. A common theme here is that the nature of written language is a product of the functions it serves in actual language use.


In general, the presence of a common underlying language system or system of ideas is accepted as a given. However, unlike the ‘purer’ theorists examined above, the notion of actual language use being outside the true object in linguistics is not central to their approach. In his book Phono-graphic Translation William Haas makes explicit the view that written signs are not secondary in nature. He seeks to explain how it is that we are able to pass from sound to letters and vice versa. He begins with a discussion of the ‘phonemic’ approach which has underpinned the theories I have outlined above. When looking for a correspondence between phonemes and graphemes he criticises the notion that graphemes are signs of phonemes as a chaotic one. For, if this were the case the initial letters in ‘cat’ and ‘cider’ would relate to an underlying [c] and therefore be ambiguous. On the other hand, the [c] and [k] would be signs in complementary distribution, and therefore equivalent. He concludes that because speech and writing can carry a message independently of each other ‘translation’ is a better term for the mechanism. He concludes: It is quite common for a perfectly intelligible recorded talk or conversation to be incapable of intelligible transcription. The inevitable absence of adequate graphic signals for patteras of stress or tone and for changes of tempo leaves much of the transcribed remainder obscure. What is required here for expression in writing is complete reformulation—‘free’ translation. (Haas 1970:85) The implication here is that it simply is not possible to say the ‘same thing’ in a different channel without extensive changes. The key phrase, in terms of semantic theory, is that ‘much of the transcribed remainder’ is left obscure, for example, how much meaning is carried by paralinguistic features which cannot be transcribed? The work of Josef Vachek supported the idea that the written form of language should be at the centre of linguistic study. In his work, speech and writing are twin domains with complementary language functions, and with little overlap. The spoken form carries out dynamic functions, and the written static ones. He too, rejects the direct phonemic correspondence of phoneme to alphabetic letter (Vachek 1976). Earlier, remarking on the process of moving from one domain to the other he states that the differences in function make it strictly impossible to say the same thing in a different medium: It may sometimes happen that an utterance primarily intended for listening needs reading, and vice versa… In such cases…transposition from the one into the other material is not done with the intention of expressing the given content by means of the other material; if it were so, the only possible accomplishment of the task would be to replace the spoken utterance with the written one or vice versa. (Vachek 1966:154)


By this he means that the expression of the content in the opposite material would lead to merely a phonetic transcription in the one case, or a spelling out of the written text in the other. This is because he believes that it is not within the scope of writing for it to accurately represent the phonic make up of spoken utterances. In Written Language Vachek queries the interchangeability of ‘spelling’ and ‘orthography’: Orthography is, in fact, a set of rules enabling the language user to transpose the spoken utterances into the corresponding written ones…it is a kind of ‘bridge’ leading from the spoken norm of language to the written. The ‘bridge’ going the other way is pronunciation. ‘Spelling’…serves to express the material make-up of the written utterance by phonic means, i.e. by successively naming each of the graphemes comprising that utterance. (Vachek 1973:18) In his view the different means of representing speech sounds graphically belong to these different domains. Phonetic transcription, although it is a graphic representation of speech, has nothing to do with writing: …in deciphering a text written in phonetic script one first of all undertakes the acoustic interpretation of the visual signs…and only then proceeds to the semantic interpretation of the acoustic facts thus obtained. (Vachek 1966:152) Much of what Vachek has to say on the relationship between spoken and written norms of language focuses on the lack of correspondence at the phonemic level. He states in Chapter 4 of Written Language that we must look for equivalences between speech and writing at a higher language level. Similarly, he sees an incompatibility between the logographic principle, and the phoneme/grapheme principle; and an additional lack of ‘fit’ at the morphemic level (he points to the example of the -s endings to English words and their different pronunciations: compare the sound at the end of trees /z/ with that of treats /s/). However, his firm view that the only means of expressing the exact content of spoken utterances in the graphic medium is through a phonetic transcription leads us to a point where the existence of what is commonly termed a verbatim transcription of speech is an impossibility. In ‘Speech and writing’ H.J.Uldall proposed a related view which differs from that of Vachek in that it does not reject the phonemic principle. He retains the notion of la langue at the heart of his exposition, and states that it makes possible the expression of one language in two forms: speech and writing. That which is common to sounds and to letters equals la langue. The actual manifestations of language are peripheral:


If either of these two substances, the stream of air or the stream of ink, were an integral part of the language itself, it would not be possible to go from one to the other without changing the language. (Uldall 1966:147) He goes on to give a largely non-semantic account of transcription, and to conclude that ‘it would be quite feasible to produce standardized artificial speech of some kind’ which would be the equivalent of printed writing. He calls writing and speaking mutually incongruent, and accounts for the differences by noting the history of the alphabet. When discussing the semantic content of the two forms he states that the unit of content is expressed in two ways, that is to say a written utterance and a spoken utterance are ‘functions of the same unit of content’ (Uldall 1966:150). He goes as far in his parallel account of the two forms as to say that a bad pen for a writer is linguistically the same as a sore throat or a cigar between the teeth of a speaker. In this outline of the relationship, unlike that of Vachek given above, the production of a verbatim transcription would offer few difficulties. However, there is little account given of the differences in the nature of the two channels (static/dynamic, ephemeral/permanent) and the effects this might have on the expression of a unit of content. The Vachek and Uldall descriptions of the relationship between spoken and written forms of language show two related versions of what may be termed the parallel/complementary outline. This is one with which, in broad terms I agree. That is to say, in an empirical account it seems sensible to allow the written form equal status with the spoken. Indeed, it seems to be the case that the more empirical the approach the less coherent becomes the idea that writing is speech written down. The most coherent and sustained continuation of this stance is in the work of M.A.K.Halliday, in particular in his book Spoken and Written Language. While he sees the spoken and the written forms of a language as emanating from the same underlying language system, Halliday focuses on the differences in form and function which affect the nature of the two manifestations. He does not deny the phonic aspect of writing. Indeed, he states that in a phonological writing system, such as the alphabet: …if a text is unintelligible when read aloud, it will also be unintelligible in writing, since the writing merely symbolises the spoken expression. (Halliday 1989:44) However, other factors serve to keep spoken and written forms of a lan guage distinct from one another even in a phonological writing situation. He points to the development of writing systems as the product of changes in society, and goes on to say that this means that the functions of the later form (writing) were not intended to replace those of speech. That is to say, due to historical factors, speech and writing serve different purposes and this leads to structural


differences. Additionally, the intrinsic nature of the different forms, the one described by Halliday as a process (speech) and the other as a product (writing) leads to further divergence between the two. Writing is unlike speech because it was designed to serve purposes that speech could not, for instance, the permanent labelling of property, listing of objects and recording of transactions (see Goody 1987; SchmandtBesserat 1986, 1992; Olson 1994 for examples of further discussions of this). For this reason it does not attempt to capture prosodic and intonational features. Furthermore, the means of production produces differences such as greater lexical density in the written form where planning and editing are a possibility. Halliday’s approach keeps a balance between the two forms, giving each due attention in their own terms. For instance, he is keen not to fall into the trap of denigrating the spoken form as careless, or unstructured. Rather, he sees speech and writing as two distinct ways of representing experience with typical features of their own. He gives several examples to support this idea, for instance he contrasts as typical of each form: Written: Every previous visit had left me with a sense of the futility of further action. Spoken: Whenever I’d visited there before, I’d ended up feeling that it would be futile if I tried to do anything more. (Halliday 1989:81) Here, it is claimed, we see the essential nature of speech as opposed to writing influencing the form in which ideas are expressed. The first, written, example presents ideas in terms of static ‘products’ the second spoken example presents them in terms of processes. There are aspects of his outline of the relationship with which one might argue, for example many of his statements are intuitively rather than empirically based. The examples given above, for instance, are ‘made up’ rather than elicited from people or found in a corpus. Halliday had previously defined the differences between spoken and written language as largely a difference of register. Without a channel-based set of real examples, the difference as presented here could equally well be between informal and formal registers, rather than speech and writing per se. Nevertheless, this largely functionally based approach to the differences between spoken and written forms is one which I have pursued in this book. Writing supreme In this last section of my discussion of the more theoretical approaches to spoken and written forms of language I deal with the work of those who have, with Marshall McLuhan (1962), argued that writing is a powerful and not altogether benign force in society. I shall be suggesting that this view, which singles out the


technology of writing from other influences, is an overstatement of the case. While I have argued that the effects of writing in linguistic theory have been underestimated, I do not adhere to the view that writing is an irresistible, isolable catalyst in social and cognitive change. There have been some very large claims made for the effects of literacy in the past. Many of these are no more than speculations based on little evidence: Could the alphabet have acted on our brain as a powerful computer language, determining or emphasising the selection of some of our perceptual and cognitive processes? (Kerckhove 1986:274) Kerckhove begins from a factual base in his initial hypothesis when he discusses the differences in reading/writing impairment between brain-damaged patients who use different scripts. He suggests that the alignment of scripts from left to right or vice versa could be a product of different hemispheres of the brain being used. However, the move from this to the question posed above is a leap from hypothesis based on fact to a counter conclusion. That is to say, we have possible evidence from the brain-damaged patients of a correlation between script alignment and hemisphere use. However, it is hard to see the causal link between this and the idea that the brain has been reshaped by contact with the alphabet. Subsequently, the cognitive effects of literacy were also criticised by historians of the process, for example, Harris (1989), and Olson (1994) provides an overview of the arguments. Many of the statements made about the power of literacy tend to be impossible to prove or disprove: Until writing most of the kind of thoughts that we are used to thinking today simply could not be thought. (Ong 1971:2) In ‘Writing and the concept of law in ancient Greece’ Jon Stratton (1980) suggests that the growth of literacy led to imbalances in society which in turn led to the instigation of restrictive laws. Brian Stock in The Implications of Literacy suggests that the advent of writing in oral cultures ‘can disrupt previous patterns of thought and action, often permanently… The model is now exteriorised’ (Stock 1983:18). In ‘Effects of printed language acquisition on speech’ Linnea C.Ehri (1985) suggests that the influence of print on our language perception is similar to that of calendars and clocks on our perception of time. Fondacaro and Higgins state that the ‘social cognitive consequences of communication tend to be greater for written than for oral communication’ (Fondacaro and Higgins 1985:98). The kinds of claims that are made for the influence of literacy can lead to potentially stigmatising attitudes to non-literate cultures. If we accept that there


is a fundamental change in the way of thinking of literate peoples, we must accept that at best there will be a difficulty of communication between literate and non-literate thinkers, or at worst fall into imagining that ‘they’ cannot think like ‘us’ but can make very pretty carvings. Out of the work of Eric Havelock on the nature of literacy in ancient Greece there has grown the idea that writing is the necessary prerequisite for analytic thought: …the alphabet converted the Greek spoken tongue into an artifact, thereby separating it from the speaker and making it into a ‘language’, that is an object available for inspection, reflection, analysis. (Havelock 1982:7–8) From this has evolved the assumption that logical thought can only be carried out in literate societies. Scholars such as Jack Goody or David Olson are at pains to point to the different value placed on kinds of thought in primarily oral versus primarily literate cultures, and thus remove any value judgements from their analyses. Nevertheless, the characteristics of primarily oral thought as presented would seem to put the non-literate at something of a disadvantage not only in an academic seminar, but also in a market-place or decision-making gathering. In primarily oral contexts inconsistency and contradiction are supposed to be hard to perceive (Goody 1977:49); the oral form is claimed to be more persuasive because it is hard to pin down and criticise statements; the alphabet is supposed to have made possible the creation of systems of classification (Goody 1977: 111), and so on. While much impressive evidence is put forward by the scholars who hold that writing can affect cognitive processes, a great deal of it is circumstantial and somewhat selective. The essential quibble is that the advent of writing in a culture is not a decontextualised event. The need/desire for literacy is part of a larger movement in a society which (generally) brings it into contact with different experiences and modes of thought. The written word alone cannot restructure thought.11 Indeed, the fashion for thinking that it can seems to have passed. Two later articles criticise the ‘determinism of literacy’ view. The first approaches the subject from an historical perspective. In The Written Word Anna Morpurgo Davies argues that the case for the influence of alphabetic writing has been overstated in the past (Morpurgo Davies 1986). The second, ‘Olson on literacy’ by John Halverson (1991) gives a clear account of Olson’s views and is highly critical of them. In particular, Halverson takes issue with the notion that the means of communication predetermines the content: Both language modalities [speech and writing] can be used in the same way and for the same purposes. Both can be explicit or vague, logical or illogical, adequately or inadequately informative, lucid or opaque; both can be ideational or interpersonal, true or false, wise or stupid; both presuppose shared knowledge.


(Halverson 1991:630) Nevertheless, the fundamental assumption that there exist two opposing systems of cognition and language use, one based on the autonomy of writing and the other on the interactive nature of speech, has been generally accepted as the basis for most of the research into speech and writing.12 For Olson’s later statements on the nature and influence of the written form see The World on Paper (Olson 1994), which also provides a wide-ranging summary and restatement of the arguments. I have included this brief overview of the ethnographic work on the influences of literacy for the reason that its conclusions have affected empirical work in the research on speech and writing. In this book I have moved away from these presuppositions and reinstate channel at the heart of any research on the relationship between the two language forms. However, it is not the case that I accept John Halverson’s ‘blanket’ account of the potential for use in each. My position, as can be seen in the previous chapters, is that the material differences between the written channel and the spoken lead to restrictions on the processing and production of content. EMPIRICAL APPROACHES In this section I discuss the work of those who form hypotheses and conclusions about speech and writing on the basis of data. I shall be giving a loosely chronological outline of previous studies, pointing out significant changes in perspective and discussing the implications of these. What is interesting in terms of the above outline of the theoretical approaches is the degree of consensus that a straightforward definition of the relationship in terms of two opposed entities— speech and writing—does not map well on to reality. A product of this has frequently been the abandonment of the analysis of spoken versus written language for its own sake, and the focusing of attention on other aspects of discourse. Quantitative analyses Early empirical work in this field tended to take the form of quantitative analyses of syntactic or lexical units. For example, Jane Blankenship’s (1962) work on sentence length in speech and writing or Roy O’Donnell’s (1974) study on the same topic. This approach sought to compare the frequencies of particular linguistic elements in the two modalities. For instance, Bengt Altenberg (1986) compares the use of contrastive linking in speech and writing and concludes that speakers use fewer types to express contrast than do writers, and that writers make greater use of subordination in showing contrasts. In the same collection Lars Hermeren (1986) discusses the forms and frequencies of the modalities of obligation, permission and volition, and states that modal nouns are generally


more frequent in the spoken than the written. Halliday (1989) has suggested that there is a greater density of content words in writing than in speech. Most compelling among the empirical school is Douglas Biber (1988) who has argued for a return to quantitative analysis of speech and writing. Apart from Halliday, the later quantitative surveys have been based on a large corpus in each channel which broadens the relevance of the conclusions. Non-quantitative approaches During the 1980s there was a growing interest in non-quantitative approaches to the relationship between spoken and written language. In the work of Gumperz (Gumperz et al. 1984; Gumperz 1982), Halliday (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Halliday 1989) or Tannen (1984) the move was away from the trees to the woods, as it were. High-level analysis of theme and cohesion tended to replace or complement the quantitative analysis. This discoursebased approach has led to the suggestion that the two forms of language are distinct at levels higher than the sentence. For example, Angela Hildyard and David Olson (1982) tested the recall in children of stories heard as opposed to stories read. They concluded that listeners pay attention to general themes whereas readers will recall more incidental details. In Literacy, Language and Learning Deborah Tannen (1985) focuses on the influence of the relative involvement in the processes of speaking and writing. The disaffection felt towards the quantitative approach in this area was made explicit in a paper by Jenny Cook-Gumperz in The Social Construction of Literacy she describes a channel-based study into the use of cohesive devices in the narratives of Black working-class children as opposed to White middle-class ones in spoken and written forms. She noted that nothing conclusive could be ascertained about the nature of any differences between the texts when a simple count of particular linguistic elements such as nominal or verbal complements was made. However, clear differences emerged when the narratives were compared in terms of what cohesive devices were being used (Cook-Gumperz 1986:212). The Black children used prosodic skills to make their system of referencing clear. For instance, the reintroduction of a previously mentioned character would be emphasised by vowel elongation and a high rise-fall intonation. White children, on the other hand would tend to reintroduce the character using syntactic, rather than prosodic devices (in particular, relative clauses). The devices used by the Black children are by nature not transferable to the written channel. Cook-Gumperz points out that White children may be at an advantage because of this in an education system that values explicit referencing. The shift of emphasis away from the counting of particular items in the two forms of language was perhaps understandable. The quantitative analyses had thrown up many contradictory findings. Douglas Biber (1988:49–51) gives a clear summary of the discrepancies between past studies. He points out that in terms of sentence length, elaboration of ideas, syntactic complexity, use of the


passive, and the numbers of adverbs/adjectives used in speech as opposed to writing, researchers have come to inconsistent conclusions. For instance, in the two studies on sentence length cited above the results were different. Blankenship found little difference in length, while O’Donnell suggested that on average writing had longer sentence units. In his own quantitative study, which uses a large number of samples drawn from various genres, Biber concludes that the distinction between speech and writing should be redefined in terms of a stylistic continuum, rather than two discrete entities. This notion of continuity overcomes the problem posed by the common sense intuition that genre and channel are not mutually defining. That is to say, certain written genres—for example a chatty, personal letter—will be closer to ‘speech’ than a piece of formal, spoken discourse such as a judge’s summing-up or an academic lecture. Others have found the speech/writing opposition unhelpful and have turned to different dichotomies such as ‘planned’ versus ‘unplanned’ discourse (Ochs 1979); ‘integration’ versus ‘fragmentation’ (Chafe 1982, 1985); ‘utterance’ and ‘text’ (Olson 1977), ‘literacy’ and ‘orality’ (Finnegan 1988; Tannen 1981, later restated as the presence or absence of markers of personal involvement in Tannen 1985), ‘stasis’ and ‘dynamism’ (Fleischman 1991). However, some of the widely accepted descriptions of the nature of writing as opposed to speech have in turn been questioned. For example, the idea that writing is more ‘autonomous’ (Olson 1977) or less personally involved (Chafe 1982) is questioned by Margaret Rader (1982) in ‘Context in written language’ and by Jacob Mey (1991). Equally the notion that the written form is more structurally complex (O’Donnell 1974; Akinnaso 1982; Chafe 1991) is not without its critics. Halliday, in particular, argues for the distinctive ‘intricacy’ of the spoken form (Halliday 1989:87). Robin Lakoff (1982) points to the use of ‘oral’ strategies in some writing, and Wallace Chafe (1982) suggests that some oral literature may be more like writing than speech (i.e. the reciter is detached and the degree of skill in the repetition means that the utterances are highly ‘polished’), and the preconceptions about channel have also been challenged more recently by Carruthers (1990) from a historical perspective. Whatever the approach, the problem one returns to is that posed by John Halverson. If it is possible to carry out any speech act, or language function in either modality, then, theoretically at least, there is no difference between speech and writing. Rather there are varieties of discourse in diverse genres and registers which have the potential to be realised in either speech or writing. In addition, the counter examples to the dichotomies outlined above suggest that the distinctions on which they are based may be a product of relying on too few examples from either form. The tendency has been to take spontaneous conversation as the paradigm for speech, and expository prose as that for writing. For instance, the previous corpus-based studies (apart from Biber) used the face-to-face conversational material from the London-Lund Corpus, and compared them mostly to printed


material (press reviews, essays, scientific/learned writings) from the LancasterOslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB), for example Tottie and Ingergerd (1986). These are the extremes of genre in each case, as most researchers allow. The choice of such divergent material for comparison means that any differences found may be a result of the genre, rather than the channel. The problem generated by the above conclusions may be expressed in two statements: any particular linguistic item may be found in either channel; any feature of discourse isolated as typical of either channel may be found in the other. If both these statements are true, then the means of production can never be said to account for differences between a given example of language use. Discussion of channel, in this view, becomes secondary to other features affecting the form and content, such as level of formality. Douglas Biber overcomes this by the use of more diverse samples in both channels. Nevertheless, he too uses the material available in the LOB and London-Lund corpora and does not include all the ‘casual’ and non-textual uses of writing. By this I mean handwritten lists and notes, and the diverse uses of writing in our everyday environment (for example, on signs and packaging). However, it is not the case that the inclusion of more and more samples will automatically lead to a better understanding of the differences between the two forms of language. For, even if we had the means of including all the speech and all the writing produced in Britain on any given day this would not answer the fundamental questions which should be asked in this context. What do we mean by ‘the same’ and ‘different’ in a comparison of speech and writing? Is it possible for the same meaning to be conveyed in either channel in the same way? If not, what are the factors restricting the choice of language in either case? The second of these questions relates to the Halverson position (he would answer: yes); and to that of William Haas, given earlier (he would answer: no). My position is that there is a potential for overlap between the two forms, but that there are some aspects of meaning which cannot ‘translate’. For instance the prosodic features which convey meaning in speech, but which can only be roughly sketched in the graphic medium. On the other hand, graphic features such as typeface, paragraphing and punctuation in the written form have no obvious counterparts in speech. There are highly complex issues underlying these questions.13 Earlier empirical research in this field has not discussed what it would be for speech and writing to be ‘the same’ in philosophical terms. There are at least three, interrelated features of language by means of which spoken and written ‘utterances’ may be compared: structure (the words said or written), function (the purpose of utterance) and content (the semantic ‘message’ or unit of meaning). Using these three terms we might begin to outline the conditions under which a spoken and a written ‘sentence’ can be called the same. Put briefly, the problem is as follows. The same words in a different channel may have a different meaning, or have a meaning in one channel but not the other (for example, ‘I saw him over there yesterday’). In this case are the spoken and written ‘the same’?


Equally, different words in different modalities may carry the same meaning (compare ‘As I noted above’ with ‘As I said before’, see also Suzanne Fleischman (1991) on the indexing metalanguage of speech as opposed to text). The previous chapters in this book have been an exercise in attempting to retain channel, rather than other discoursal factors, at the heart of the comparison of speech and writing, and at the same time to move beyond textual quantitative comparisons to look at the relations between texts and utterances and their contexts, and at the associated relations between speakers and hearers, writers and readers. Without the retention of a sense of how, where and why, by whom and for whom samples of speech and writing were produced, some essential differences between the two forms will always be neglected.

Appendix Approaching language analysis: a briefbeginners’ guide and glossary

INTRODUCTION This appendix is a reference section containing some guidance on linguistic analysis and is aimed at readers with no prior experience of the subject. Many linguistic descriptions are based around the concept of systems working at different levels. It is possible to begin the study of language at the level of individual sounds (this is called phonetics), or to look at which sounds are significant in forming differences between words in a language (phonemics). Turning from sounds to the structure of words it is possible to describe the parts of words which make them work differently from one another, for example in English the -s which is typically added to words when they are plural (the study of this is called morphology). The different approaches to language study are shown in a simplified way in Figure A.1, and from this it can be seen that in relation to this book the levels we are most concerned with are lexical studies, grammar and discourse studies, since these are the approaches most dealt with in the comparison of speech and writing as contrasting forms of language. The triangular shape of the diagram indicates a traditional view of language. This suggests that it can be studied in terms of these different levels, each with its own terminology, but also that the terms of reference are gradually widened from individual sounds up to the relations between words across extended discourse. Therefore, it can be useful to think of each level as being built up of units from the level below, particularly since studies at one level often need to break up the units they are dealing with into smaller units for the purposes of analysis. In the glossary which follows some indication is generally given for each entry as to the level of analysis it is associated with. GLOSSARY In this alphabetic glossary the terms described are generally in the form in which they occur in the main text of the book. Cross-referenced terms which relate to the item being described are italicised. In the case of longer entries, I have

APPENDIX: APPROACHING LANGUAGE ANALYSIS 147

Figure A. 1 Approaches to language study

attempted to give a very brief overview with a general sense of the word first (to enable the reader to continue reading the chapter they found the term in), followed by more detailed information for those who wish to have a slightly deeper understanding, for example, those wishing to begin grammatical analysis for themselves. accommodation: term used by sociolinguists to describe the (often unconscious) process by which people alter their style of language to make it similar to that of others. These changes are often seen by linguists as having social significance, since the way in which we speak is one of the ways we show who we identify with. adjective: a word class term. The adjectives in the following passage from a short story by Katherine Porter have been italicised. …her nose was scarlet with sunburn; he told her that already she looked like a born country woman. His grey flannel shirt stuck to him, his heavy shoes were dusty. She assured him he looked like a rural character in a play. (Porter 1958) The function of adjectives is to add information to a noun (or more strictly a noun phrase). They can be found either after the verb ‘BE’, as in ‘her nose was scarlet’, ‘his…shoes were dusty’, or in front of nouns: ‘heavy shoes’; ‘rural character’. Other word class items can fulfil the same

148 APPENDIX: APPROACHING LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

function as adjectives. In particular, nouns (‘flannel shirt’; ‘country woman’) can modify other nouns, as can verbs (‘laughing brook’). adverb: a word class term. Adverbs have sometimes been described as the ‘miscellaneous’ word class, and as a rule of thumb, if you cannot classify a word as a noun, verb, adjective or preposition you will be correct in calling it an adverb. It is a very diverse class containing not only words which directly describe an action (such as ‘quickly’), but also words which affect (modify) adjectives (such as ‘very handsome’) or even other adverbs (‘too quickly’). adverbial: a functional class term for the part of a clause or sentence (a constituent) which provides information about the circumstances or causes of the main action (how, when, where, why, for how long etc.). The adverbial elements have been italicised in the following: My youngest daughter was about five years old and I was taking her to the dentist and I was coming down Southport Road near the police station. (CUP/Nottingham corpus) adverbial position: a sentence structure term for the usual position in a sentence or clause for the adverbial constituent (i.e. at the end). See above under adverbial. anaphoric: a term used in grammar and discourse studies to describe the nature of a link between two words or phrases. In an anaphoric link the direction is backwards, as in the following example where the explicit reference (‘your work’) occurs before the less explicit reference (‘it’). A forwards pointing link is called ‘cataphoric’. ‘How is your work getting on?’ said Ravelston presently. ‘Oh, as usual. It’s a drowsy kind of job…’ (KAF) back channel: a term from discourse analysis used to describe largely content-free utterances which a speaker produces to show that they are listening and understanding what another speaker is saying. Bloomfield: Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) was a highly influential American linguist, whose book Language (1933) largely defined the practice and theory of language study until the 1960s. cataphoric: a term used in grammar and discourse studies to describe the nature of a link between two words or phrases. A cataphoric link ‘points forwards’ to something which the language user (often) wants to highlight: ‘The main idea is this, the tax increases will hit the poorest sections in society.’ Here, the word ‘this’ points towards the following idea (cf. anaphoric). channel: a term used to refer to the way in which a sample of language has been produced, rather as we talk of broadcasting channels. The term is discussed more fully in Chapter 1.


clause: a term from grammatical description which is sometimes used synonymously with ‘sentence’, and I have adopted this coward’s way out in this book. A useful definition of a clause is that it is a stretch of language containing a verb, whereas the term ‘sentence’ carries with it an implication of completeness. Therefore, ‘Leaving the room…’ is a clause, but it does not seem complete. On the other hand, the following does: ‘Leaving the room, I slammed the door.’ However, particularly in the spoken channel, finding the beginnings and endings of segments which we could call sentences can be difficult, therefore the term ‘clause’ is often adopted. In the following, the clauses have been marked off by lines, with the verb in each italicised: My youngest daughter was about five years old || and I was taking her to the dentist || and I was coming down Southport Road near the police station. (CUP/Nottingham corpus) This extract of speech contains three clauses, and they are defined as main clauses because each could stand alone as a separate, complete ‘sentence’: My youngest daughter was about five years old. I was taking her to the dentist. I was coming down Southport Road near the police station. The other major type of clause is a subordinate clause, a clause which is dependent on another and cannot stand independently. cohesive devices: a general term for the forms which help to make a stretch of discourse ‘hang together’ or cohere. These include the links between words which refer to the same thing (as in anaphora or cataphora), and words which make the relations between one idea and the next explicit: Spoken to put down a question was a very serious thing… Members were under pressure…

Written To put down such a question was a serious matter. However, Honourable Members are now put under pressure…

There is a tendency for greater explicitness of linking in the written, as exemplified above. collocate: a term from lexical studies used to express the fact that some words have a greater affinity with one another than others. For example, if


we consider the words ‘tall’ and ‘high’ they seem to be more appropriate with some nouns than others: ‘tall’—person/tree/story/ship; ‘high’—wall/ mountain/sea/road. This is also true of verbs, for example we ‘make a mistake’ but ‘do an essay’. These patterns have more to do with usage than meaning, and are difficult to explain to people who are learning English. competence: a term from grammar theory (as opposed to descriptive grammars) which is usually contrasted to performance. It refers to the underlying capacity for language and language learning common to all humans. complement: a term from grammar which is used in various ways in differ ent systems. The underlying idea is that a complement is part of the structure of a clause or phrase which is made obligatory by another element. For example, the verb ‘catch’ demands something after it to complete the sense. constituent: a term from grammatical description for a unit (it can be one word or several) which functions as a grammatically significant element, such as the subject or complement. content words: a term from lexical studies. Content words carry the meaning in an utterance and are contrasted with grammatical words the function of which is to show the relations between them. So, for example, in ‘the pen of my aunt’ there are two content words (‘pen’ and ‘aunt’) and the rest show the relation between them. (See under grammatical words and lexical density for further information.) co-ordinating conjunction: a grammatical term for a particular set of words in the class ‘conjunction’, the function of which is to link parts of a clause or sentence together (for example, ‘and’, ‘but’ or ‘or’). They are usually contrasted with ‘subordinating conjunctions’, (e.g. ‘because’, ‘if’ or ‘when’). These latter mark a clause as strongly dependent on another clause, rather than simply connected to it. There is often a higher incidence of co-ordinating conjunctions in speech, particularly ‘and’, and more explicit markers of subordination in writing. …there’s a a blackberry field and he said it must have been planted in about 1910 and it must be the oldest one in Britain… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) In the extract of real speech given above, three potentially separate sentences have been joined loosely together by the co-ordinating conjunction ‘and’. This allows the presentation of a progression of linked ideas as they occur in the mind of the speaker, and the relation of ideas between them can be made clear by intonation or the return to an idea for further emphasis. With the greater time for planning allowed by the written channel this might be reformulated to make the relations between the ideas more explicit by using the subordinating conjunction ‘because’:


There’s a blackberry field which must be the oldest one in Britain, because he said it must have been planted in about 1910. deep structure: a term associated with grammatical theory, particularly that propounded by Noam Chomsky. The key idea is that, underlying actual utterances made by people, there is a more basic and abstract structure. These underlying structures assist the theory to account for sentences which look the same but have more than one possible meaning, and to relate sentences which look different but which convey the same information, for example, passive and active forms: ‘trees are cut down by lumberjacks’ and ‘lumberjacks cut down trees’. The term is often used in contrast to surface structure. demonstrative pronoun: a member of the word class pronoun which is used to ‘point’ to things in English: this, that, these, those. The greater contextual dependency of speech often leads to a greater use of them. diachronic: a term from linguistic theory applied to approaches to language study which are interested in the historical development of an aspect rather than taking a ‘snapshot’ or ‘cross-section’ of the. state of the language at any one time. This latter approach comes under the term ‘synchronic’ study. Following the famous linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the analogy might be made between a diachronic description of a chess game which would analyse the progression of the moves made as opposed to a description of the state of the board after any one move. discourse markers: a term from discourse analysis for words which serve an organisational purpose to show the transition of ideas or functional units of discourse. Examples of words used in this way are: right, okay, so, now, anyway. The conventions of organisation in writing, for example paragraphing, and the fact that it is not produced with a present interlocutor means that these have a lower frequency in the written channel. In the following example, the speaker marks the transition from one section and topic to the next by ‘now’. It is not being used as an adverb, but as a transition marker. Spoken

Written

I am simply explaining the dangers that will certainly arise in the future were we to be foolish enough to allow the intervention of the camera lens. Now could there exist a greater temptation...

I am simply explaining the dangers that will certainly arise in the future were we to be foolish enough to allow the intervention of the camera lens. Could there exist a greater temptation ...

disfluency features: features of speech which might be categorised as ‘mistakes’, for example hesitations, false-starts, repetitions. These are a result of the pressures on language producers in the spoken channel.


Interestingly, a speaker who has a high incidence of these often produces fewer other ‘mistakes’ of grammar and lexis, and their speech can translate directly into writing: Spoken

Written

I can understand the anxieties of [er] honourable and righthonourable [er] members who feel that the televising of our proceedings [er] here may tend to trivialise parliament

I can understand the anxieties of Right Honourable and Honourable Members who feel that the televising of our proceedings might tend to trivialise Parliament.

On the other hand, speakers who do not give themselves time to think by means of these features often speak very fluently, but the style of speaking does not transfer to the written channel easily. The following speaker has very few disfluency features, but his discourse is changed a good deal in the process of transcription (the extra words in the spoken text in comparison with the written are italicised): Spoken

Written

and that really is the essential about television it’s about entertainment and not government that it’s about the ratings that it’s about the competition between each channel

The essence of television is this: it’s about entertainment, not government. It is about ratings and about competition between channels

ellipsis: a concept from grammar and discourse studies which describes the ‘missing out’ of part of a sentence. For example, in writing typical ellipsis would be: ‘Some Heads of State expressed concern, others did not’ In this example we understand that the sentence could end ‘express concern’, but that it is not necessary to repeat the verb and complement. In speech there is far more ellipsis as speakers can assume that listeners will ‘fill in’ the gaps from their shared knowledge. Particularly typical of speech is the omission of T or ‘you’ in expressions such as ‘don’t know’, ‘might be’, sometimes combined with the deletion of auxiliary verbs as in ‘ready yet?’, ‘seen him?’ existential sentence: a sentence which simply asserts that something exists, in English these begin: ‘There is/are’. exophoric: a type of reference which depends on ‘pointing to’ something in the situational context of the discourse in order for it to be understood, for example, ‘she’s nice’ said with a nod towards a person in


the vicinity. As would be expected from the nature of exophoric reference, it tends to be more common in speech than in writing. In writing exophoric references by speakers, for example in a dialogue, need to be explained for the reader. Transcribers also need to take the reader into account and frequently remove exophoric references from their version of the spoken discourse: Spoken

Written

the bomb was thrown the Press sat up there laughing

…the bomb was thrown. The Press sat laughing in the Press Gallery

expletive: a word or phrase in the form of an exclamation which has little meaning beyond the expression of surprise or anger (swear words are called expletives). finite: a term from grammatical description applied to verbs, and usually contrasted with non-finite. When a verb is used in a main clause it has to be in the appropriate tense and show this. In standard grammar, we cannot say ‘He leaving the station’, but must add ‘is’ to mark the tense as referring to now. Similarly, we cannot say ‘He leave on Thursday’ but must indicate the tense by using the appropriate form (‘left’ for past tense, ‘leaves’ or ‘will leave’ for future reference). When verbs are used in this way they are called ‘finite’. formulaic: a term from discourse studies used to refer to extremely fixed patterns of interaction. The beginnings and endings of conversations are medium such as the telephone. Different cultures have different patterns, for example different nationalities vary in whether they typically speak first on picking up the telephone or wait for the caller to speak, but the patterning will generally be present and predictable. generative grammar: a term from theoretical grammar coined to describe the insights of the linguist Noam Chomsky. In this approach grammar is seen as an abstract entity akin to a mathematical or logical system. The key concept in the approach was that of well-formedness (grammatical ‘correctness’) and the aim was to isolate a set of rules which would ‘generate’ correct sentences and only correct sentences from underlying structures or deep structures. grammatical words: a term from lexical studies. The nature of any sample of language can be described in terms of a lexical density score. The approach is based on the division of all the words in a text into two categories: lexical words and grammatical words (also called ‘content words’ and ‘function words’, or ‘meaning words’ and ‘structure words’) and calculating the proportion of each. Grammatical words have little meaning in themselves but serve to show the relations between the


meaning-bearing words (they are the words which often get left out of small-ads or telegrams when people are conscious of the cost of each word). grapheme: the smallest meaningful unit in a writing system, for example the letters in an alphabetic system. head word: a term from grammatical description. The parts of a sentence can be described in terms of how they relate to one another inside a phrase. The main or key word in a phrase is called the head word. The word classes noun, adjective, adverb are most commonly described in this way. If we take the example ‘competition between channels’ the word ‘competition’ is the head word. The phrase ‘between channels’ adds further information to define the kind of competition and would answer the question ‘what kind of competition’. Second, the head noun affects the form of the verb which follows: ‘competition between channels causes…’ In the phrases ‘horribly soon’ or ‘fantastically expensive’ the head words are the ones italicised. The other words modify the adverb (soon) or the adjective (expensive). historical present: a term from grammatical description. When speakers or writers refer to past events they sometimes choose not to use the past tense: ‘this man walked into a pub’ becomes ‘this man walks into a pub’ and this use of the present is traditionally called the historical present. ideographic: a term used to describe writing systems in which a symbol is used to convey a whole idea or word. idiolect: a term used in dialect studies and sociolinguistics. Whereas the term dialect refers to the language of a group of people who can be said to speak the same language, but with consistent variation, such as Yorkshire dialect, the term idiolect has been coined to refer to the language used by any one individual. idiomatic: a term often used in lexical studies and in register studies. An idiom is a fixed expression the meaning of which cannot usually be gathered by a literal understanding of the individual words, and which is generally of informal style. Thus, in the expression ‘hair of the dog’ the import cannot be gathered from understanding each word separately, nor would it be appropriate in a formal context. Casual speech tends to rely on idiomatic expressions more heavily than writing, and speakers can often use part of an idiom without completing it, knowing that their interlocutors will fill in to rest, for example, ‘every cloud…’. We also tend to use idioms in speech to show our evaluation of a topic, and to deal with difficult topics to show that we are unaffected by them, for example there are numerous idioms associated with death and dying. Idioms tend to appear in restricted settings in writing, with headline writers, for example, relying on the common pool of knowledge of them for creative purposes. implicature: a term associated with the philosophy of language and discourse studies. It is frequently the case that speakers mean more than


they apparently say. If a speaker says ‘It’s half past eleven’ they may be implying more than a mere statement of the time. For example, it could imply that they have to leave, that the person spoken to is late, and so on. The investigation of this aspect of language is the study of implicature. initiation: a term from discourse analysis. The contributions to an interaction are often thought of in terms of ‘moves’, rather as in a game. Discourse analysis is to a large extent concerned with the patterning of these moves and how they relate to one another. The satisfactoriness of a sequence in spoken interaction depends on the speakers producing appropriate initiations and responses. For example, a greeting is usually followed by another greeting, a question by an answer and so on. A great deal of the creativity found in humour or in dramatic dialogue hinges on playing with the expectations we have about proper initiations and responses. instantiation: the actual words used to convey an idea, similar to realisation. interlocutor: person with whom you are communicating. The term tends to be used more to refer to speakers and listeners than writers and readers, although both are possible. intuition: a term from theoretical grammar. The key idea is that as language users we have reliable views of what is possible and correct (wellformed) in our language, these views were relied on particularly heavily in the early days of generative grammar. langue: a French term from theoretical linguistics particularly associated with the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure. The term conveys the notion of language to be studied as an abstract system, rather than any one particular language (langage), or actual language use (parole). lexical density: the nature of any sample of language can be described in terms of a lexical density score. The approach is based on the division of all the words in a text into two categories: lexical words and grammatical words (also called ‘content words’ and ‘function words’) and calculating the proportion of each. Spontaneous speech usually has a higher proportion of grammatical words than writing, and therefore a lower lexical density. In the following the grammatical words have been italicised: Spoken

Written

and that really is the essential about television it’s about entertainment and not government that it’s about the ratings that it’s about the competition between each channel

The essence of television is this: it is about entertainment, not government. It is about ratings and about competition between channels


By totalling the number of words in a text, and calculating the proportion of lexical words the lexical density can be found. lexical words: a term from lexical studies. Lexical words carry the meaning in an utterance and are contrasted with grammatical words the function of which is to show the relations between them. (See under grammatical words and lexical density for further information.) lexis: a term from lexical studies, a rather more formal way of expressing ‘vocabulary’, but it can also imply a division between words in the form you use them, as opposed to the conventional representation of a ‘base’ form as in a dictionary entry. It is generally used in the less specific sense in this book. logographic: a writing system in which a symbol represents a word, as in the system of Chinese characters. main clause: a term from traditional grammar description used to describe an independent clause which can ‘stand alone’. In standard grammar this means that a main clause must contain a finite (tensed) verb. It is usually contrasted with the term subordinate clause. In the following extract from a newspaper sports report there is one main clause and one subordinate clause: The message came loud and clear at the Baseball Ground on Wednesday night [=main clause], when a sharper McSwegan might have repeated Nigel Jemson’s hat-trick feat [=subordinate clause]. main verb: a term from traditional grammar description used to describe the lexical or main word in a verb phrase. In ‘the bridge has been being built for three years’ the main verb is ‘built’. modification: a term used in grammar to describe the interrelation between a word (a head word) and the words it is affected by. Modification can be carried out by one word, such as ‘very’ which modifies the word ‘nice’ in the phrase ‘a very nice bloke’, or more than one: the words ‘very nice’ work together as a unit to modify ‘bloke’. non-finite: a term from grammar description used to describe verbs. Every English verb has three non-finite forms: ‘base’, ‘-ed’ and ‘-ing’, and used in one of these forms they do not show tense (this is a bit confusing because the ‘-ed’ form sometimes looks like the past tense form). Nonfinite verbs can be used in clauses, but these clauses cannot ‘stand alone’ in standard grammar as main clauses. The ‘base’ form is often used with ‘to’: ‘To free the paper jam…’ (needs completing with something like ‘he lifted the lid of the printer’). The ‘-ed’ form often carries a passive meaning: ‘The subject discussed by the shareholders…’ (needs completing with something like ‘was the level of their probable dividends’). The ‘-ing’ form carries an active meaning: ‘The commuters leaving the train’. noun phrase: a phrase which has a noun as its central word (head word). The noun phrases in the following have been italicised:


…her nose was scarlet with sunbum; he told her that already she looked like a born country woman. His grey flannel shirt stuck to him, his heavy shoes were dusty. She assured him he looked like a rural character in a play. (Porter 1958) Noun phrases have a typical structure of basically four elements which the beginning analyst should look for: Determiner

Premodifier

Head noun

Postmodifier

born country grey flannel heavy rural

nose sunburn woman shirt shoes character

in a play

her a his his a

Points to remember when analysing noun phrases are: (1) they can consist of one word (‘sunburn’); (2) they can be very long and complex, and you need to look for the complete unit (not just ‘a rural character’ but more specifically ‘a rural character in a play’); and (3) they can be postmodified by special types of clauses, for example relative clauses. orthography: the rules, and the study of the rules, of spelling in a writing system. paralinguistic: some features of communication are regarded as less central to the study of language than others, for example body language or gaze, and these are termed ‘paralinguistic’. parole: a French term strongly associated with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure who drew a distinction between actual language as spoken — parole—as opposed to the underlying system of signs which he termed langue. passive, the: a term from traditional grammar description used to describe a particular structuring of information which alters the form of the verb phrase. The verbs in the passive are underlined in the following extract: Right down the bottom of the orchards there’s a a blackberry field and he said it must have been planted in about 1910 and it must be the oldest one in Britain and if it was managed it would keep a family without bothering about the orchards… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) The passive is used when we either do not know, or do not wish to mention, the person who carried out an action. In the above, since the


Figure A.2 Example of phrase embedding

person who planted the blackberry patch is unknown, the speaker has to use the passive construction. The active forms of the verbs in the extract would be: ‘The farmer must have planted it in about 1910’; ‘If he managed it, it would keep a family.’ Since it permits a greater degree of impersonality, the passive tends to be found more in writing than in speech, particularly in formal writing. performance: a term from theoretical grammar, particularly associated with the insights of the linguist Noam Chomsky. The key notion is that of a contrast between an idealised speaker-hearer (whose knowledge of the language is referred to as competence) with actual speakers in actual contexts who are prone to errors and limitations. phoneme: a phoneme is a sound which contrasts meaningfully with other sounds in a language to produce the contrasts we can hear between words. In different languages different phonemes carry these contrasts. phrase: a term from grammar description which is frequently used to contrast with clause. It is quite useful to think of clauses as being constituted of phrases (since this permits analysis at either of these ‘levels’, with differing amounts of detail), but this leads to the initially confusing fact that you can have a ‘phrase’ consisting of one word. In the first example there are two one-word noun phrases (NP) and one verb phrase (VP), while the second contains phrases made up of several words: (cats)[=NP] (chase)[=VP] (birds)[=NP] (The hunting instincts of a domestic cat)[=NP] (will cause)[=VP] (the early demise of many birds within its territory)[=NP] Phrases are categorised according to the most important word they contain (apart from prepositional phrases), for example, apart from the noun and verb phrases noted above there are: adjective phrases (AdjP: e.g. ‘beautiful’, ‘quite incredibly beautiful’); adverb phrases (AdvP: e.g. ‘chauvinistically’, ‘unbelievably chauvinistically’); and prepositional phrases (PrepP: e.g. ‘to the shops’). Phrases can, and often are, nested inside other phrases. Thus inside the noun phrase: ‘the early demise of many birds within its territory’ there are several other phrases which go to make it up, for example, ‘within its


territory’ is a prepositional phrase, and inside that (as there always has to be) there is another, smaller, noun phrase: ‘its territory’. postvocalic: a term from phonetics (the study of the sounds of a language in relation to each other rather than to meaning). The term refers to a position of a sound as being after a vowel. prepositional phrase: a term from grammar description. A prepositional phrase (PrepP) has the structure: preposition+noun phrase. The way to spot a Prepositional phrase is to look out for common prepositions (of, on, with, between, in, to, etc.) followed by nouns, and see whether they form a functioning unit. (See also phrase.) production errors: another term for disfluency features with greater emphasis on the influence of how the language is produced on the level of ‘errors’. prosodic features: aspects of language which include the nature and quality of sounds, for example, the speed of speech, or the pitch at which it is spoken, the rhythm or intonation. These are particularly relevant to the spoken channel where subtle changes in meaning can be introduced by alterations in the prosodic features. realisation: an actual production of a more abstract entity, for example, the actual utterance by a speaker of a phoneme. The underlying abstraction always tends to be tidier and more in line with the theory than the variety of ways in which a speaker produces it. register: a term from sociolinguistics and descriptive linguistics. The key notion is that different styles of language occur in different social settings, and that these differences are fairly predictable, recognisable and describable. For example, people can usually recognise legal language, and distinguish it from biblical language. relative clause: a term from grammar description. A relative clause adds information to a noun, and can often be spotted by means of a relative pronoun which introduces it, for example, ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘that’. In the sentence ‘the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo died in poverty’ there are really two possible sentences compressed into one: (a) ‘The man broke the bank at Monte Carlo’ and (b) ‘He died in poverty.’ By adding ‘who’ in front of the verb ‘broke’ we produce a relative clause (italicised): ‘The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’. In standard grammar this construction cannot stand alone but needs to be put into a full sentence with a main verb (‘died’) after it. In writing, relative clauses are used in a more standardised way than in speech, and it is less common to see the omission of the relative pronoun (as in ‘The man [who(m)] I saw’). In modern speech, the omission is becoming standard, and when a relative pronoun is obligatory (i.e. when the noun referred to is the subject of the main clause) there is a growing cross-over between the use of ‘which’ and ‘that’. Thus in speech we can find the following: ‘any producer which didn’t show it…would get the


sack’, whereas in writing this would normally be expressed; ‘Any producer who did not show it…would get the sack.’ relative pronoun: a word class term referring to a small group of words which introduce extra information in a relative clause added after a noun: ‘who’, ‘whose’ and ‘whom’ for adding information about people; ‘which’, ‘that’ for adding information about things (although ‘that’ is commonly used in speech to talk about people as well, and see above under relative clause for further information). response: a term from discourse analysis (see under initiation). RP: a common shortening of the term ‘received pronunciation’. This way of pronouncing words is strongly associated with Standard English, and traditionally with influential sections of society such as public schools, universities, the BBC and so on. Rather than being associated with any particular geographical area (although it has many features of Southern English) it tends to be regarded as a class marker. Saussure, Ferdinand de: an influential linguist (1857–1913) whose lectures on the subject of language as an abstract system of signs (reconstructed and published after his death as the Cours de linguistique génémle, often shortened to the Cours) laid the basis for twentieth-century linguistics. semantics: the study of meaning in relation to language. Sometimes the term is also used as a synonym for ‘meaning’, as in ‘the semantics of the exchange between the political leaders is unclear’. semiotics: the study of the signs in relation to communication. spectograph: an instrument used in the study of speech sounds (phonetics). It can produce a visual image of the sounds of the human voice. structural words: (see grammatical words and lexical density). subject: a term from descriptive grammar, sometimes also called the grammatical subject. The subject of a sentence can be found by first finding the verb, and then forming a question along the lines: ‘who/what does?’ the verb. In the following, the verbs are italicised: My youngest daughter was about five years old and I was taking her to the dentist and I was coming down Southport Road near the police station. (CUP/Nottingham corpus) The questions to find the subjects which go with the verbs are: Who was five years old? Answer: ‘My youngest daughter’ [=subject] Who was taking her to the dentist? Answer:‘I’ [=subject] Who was coming down Southport Road? Answer: ‘I’ [=subject]


In speech, grammatical subjects tend to be shorter and less complex than in writing, and once a topic is established it can be frequently referred to by a simple pronoun, like ‘it’ or ‘they’ rather than a long noun phrase. subject position: the place in a clause where the subject is typically found (i.e. before the verb in English). subordinate clause: a term from grammatical description which is used to contrast with main clause. Right down the bottom of the orchards there’s a a blackberry field…if it was managed it would keep a family without bothering about the orchards… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) Subordinate clauses cannot stand independently. In the above, the subordinate clause is italicised, and this part of the utterance demands another clause for it to be completed: ‘If it was managed…?’ Subordinate clauses are introduced by a subordinating conjunction, such as ‘when’, ‘if or ‘because’. surface structure: a term from theoretical grammar used to describe the highest level, or the output, of a generative grammar. third person: a term from traditional grammar description. There are two other ‘persons’: first (I/we); second (you, singular and plural) together with third (he/she/it/they). token (and type): a term from lexical studies. In any stretch of language there are usually more tokens than types. This is because a ‘type’ is the base form of a word, as you might find it listed in a dictionary, whereas a ‘token’ is the actual word, each occurrence of which can be counted. The following extract contains twenty-six tokens, but a list of the types would not include the repetitions of ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘it’ and ‘must’, and the different forms of the verb ‘be’ (‘is’, ‘been’ and ‘be’) would also count as a single type. …there’s a a blackberry field and he said it must have been planted in about 1910 and it must be the oldest one in Britain… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) transformational grammar: a term from theoretical grammar coined to describe an aspect of Noam Chomsky’s approach to grammar (see also deep structure and generative grammar). The stages in the process of ‘generating’ correct sentences from underlying ‘deep structures’ are called ‘transformations’. type (and token): (see under Token). verb: a word class term from traditional grammar. Verbs are very influential in terms of the structure of clauses, and play a central role in determining what needs to be included in a clause. Verbs are traditionally described as ‘action’ words, although they can also convey a great range of meanings (see also verb phrase and clause).


verb phrase: a term from descriptive grammar used to describe the part of a clause which consists of the verb and its associated elements. In the following, the verb phrases are italicised: …there’s a a blackberry field and he said it must have been planted in about 1910 and it must be the oldest one in Britain… (CUP/Nottingham corpus) A verb phrase consists of the main (lexical) verb and any other auxiliary (do/ be/have) or modal (must/may/shall, etc.) verbs which help it convey meaning. vowel length: the basic vowel sounds in English (often taught as represented by the alphabetic letters: a, e, i, o, u) vary in length, and this can lead to a distinction between different words (for example, ‘ship’ (short) and ‘sheep’ (long)). well-formed: see generative grammar. In some approaches to grammar, particularly in their earlier days, the judgements of individuals about the correctness of sentences was an important part in deciding what the aims of the grammar should be. wh-question: a term from descriptive grammar. A question which cannot be answered yes/no, and which is formed using one of the following: who, what, when, where, how, why. yes/no question: a term from descriptive grammar. Unlike a whquestion these can be answered with yes/no: ‘Are you coming to the party?’—‘Yes’ (as opposed to ‘when are you coming to the party’ to which the answer cannot be ‘yes’ or ‘no’). PATHS TO FURTHER STUDY This section contains a short bibliographical essay to enable students to find upto-date source material for their own work. Finding sources and reading efficiently As a student one is often faced with either a daunting amount of material to read, or an apparent lack of sources on the particular topic you are interested in. The skills which need to be learned to solve these problems are not necessarily faster reading, but more efficient and varied ways of reading, combined with a targeting of appropriate material and a sense of the nature and variety of sources available. Two main points to note are: (1) academic reading should be undertaken with a specific aim in mind (for example, finding information on the key terms from the essay you have been asked to write); and (2) professional scholars very rarely read the whole of a text in detail the first time that they encounter it.


The reason for the latter point is that academics generally have a particular area of specialisation or interest which motivates their reading, and this enables them to develop the skill of assessing texts before reading them .to see whether they are appropriate, and of ‘skimming’ through texts to see if they contain the type of information they require. Having found the text, or part of text, which is particularly relevant, this can become the focus for more detailed reading. As a student, similar skills often need to be developed in order to complete sufficient background reading for an essay or dissertation. To increase efficiency in reading you should make a text work for you, rather than letting a text which may turn out to be less than relevant dominate a whole morning or evening of detailed, slow reading. Before looking for source material, decide what type of information you need (for example, do you need general background information, or a detail about some particular aspect?). Different types of text typically contain different levels of detail, and you should consider this before starting out. For example, as a rule of thumb, journal articles and conference proceedings tend to contain more ‘up-tothe-minute’, specialist information than books. Equally, books can vary from monographs (high-level, detailed texts by a well-known expert in the field, often difficult for the undergraduate without more background information) to more introductory overviews of a topic, such as the books in this series. Assessing the level, type of information and intended audience of a text before starting to read can reduce wasted reading effort considerably. Useful sources Having made some preliminary decisions about the information you need for the task in hand it is useful to know the nature of source material available in the field, and how to find it. The books which are recommended as further reading at the end of each of the previous chapters contain good bibliographies, and these in turn can lead you to further sources on the topic you are most interested in. One of the things to assess when you are choosing a book is the level of detail in the reference section, and also when the book was published, and how up-to-date the bibliography is. Journal articles and their bibliographies are a good source of information and further paths of research for more advanced students, and the references in articles will tend to be more up-to-date than those found in a book. Journals also have review sections of new publications which can provide a ‘taste’ of a book, and lists of ‘books received’ (i.e. new from publishers), and can be a good source of relevant new material. Journals which are of particular interest to the student investigating speech and writing are: Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Research in Reading, Language, Language in Society, Text, Written Communication. Those more interested in theoretical issues might also turn to Journal of Linguistics; those interested in more applied approaches, particularly in the field


of language teaching would find Applied Linguistics of interest; and the journal Language and Literature offers interdisciplinary perspectives similar to those of this series. In addition, the more advanced scholar who is perhaps reading for a dissertation might wish to undertake wider searches using research tools which are prepared for academics. These include traditional paper sources, such as the MLA bibliography and abstracting system or Kluwer’s Linguistic Bibliography, and electronic information sources such as CD-ROMs (the MLA bibliography is now available in that format for easier searching) or the BIDS system.

Notes

1 PROPERTIES OF SPEECH AND WRITING 1 This rather simplified picture of communication with readers and listeners ‘decoding’ samples of language thrown at them is only being used to exemplify this particular point, and is queried in Chapter 2. 2 At times, discourse may be delivered via the spoken channel in circumstances which reduce the role of the recipient to that of a passive listener with a low, or non-existent potential for interaction, for example during a formal lecture, speech, or via a recorded medium such as film, radio or television. These examples of public, non-interactive discourse are not without their ideological saliency, since in day-to-day speaking it is normally only in certain privileged circumstances that we allow one speaker to dominate the floor and hand over our potential to speak to them. The balance of listening and speaking roles in any sample of speech reflects the psychological and social identity of the participants. 3 An interesting historical survey by Keith Thomas (1986) suggests that calculation of literacy levels needs to take account of whether people’s ability to read extends to all media, including handwriting. 4 In recent years, educationalists have come to attempt to test oral skills, and speaking examinations have always been a part of second language learning. However, the general tendency is still for speaking to be regarded as a ‘natural’ process. 5 Ideally, any analysis of the spoken would be made directly from the sound medium (i.e. the tape recordings made of the exchanges) however, as has been noted previously, almost all linguistic analysis has to take place through the written channel and the present study is not an exception. Nonetheless, given the important status of channel and medium in the comparison of speech and writing, it should be remembered that the artefact which we are looking at—the transcript — is itself a representation of the original speech event, and carries with it the reductions and conventions which are inherent in any representation. It is ironic, and significant, that a channel-based comparison must rely on one, highly influential channel, the written, to communicate examples and analyses from the other, spoken channel. 6 The decision whether to do this or not is controversial in terms of linguistic theory. Many theorists would argue that the deviant structures being analysed are only such

166 NOTES

at a superficial level (what are termed ‘surface’ errors of ‘production’ rather than the underlying structures of the language system). Nevertheless, as is noted in Chapter 5, if the description of language is removed to this abstract level then channel comparison becomes highly problematic. Therefore, for the purposes of a channel-based survey of speech and writing, this theoretical issue has been laid aside, and a strongly descriptive line taken. 7 A further example of more permanent and publicly oriented speech is given in the tasks at the end of this chapter, where a short extract from an interview with an academic is given. This was transcribed in an edited format (i.e. most disfluency features were removed) and published in an academic journal, thus giving the dynamic flow of ideas expressed in the spoken channel a degree of permanence.

2 INTERACTIONS ON THE PAGE 1 This chapter deals with dialogue in non-dramatic contexts, for example, the novel and short story. There are further issues for the discussion if we broaden the sample material to include dramatic dialogue. 2 However, it is important to remember that this is intended as a methodologically useful step, rather than being significant in theoretical terms. That is to say, paring down spoken data to the basics in this way is done in order to give a ‘handle’ on the data, a basis from which to see the nature of the interaction. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this interpretive step is in itself the analysis; or that, more grotesquely, this is how speakers would (or ought to) speak if they had more time to plan what they were going to say. The magic of spoken language lies in the fact that it is a dynamic process which is strongly temporally dependent. After the fact, or for the purposes of analysis, we might see exchanges in terms of question and answer, or greeting and greeting, but at the time of utterance we are usually too bound up in co-operating to produce the elaborate texture which is typical of a smoothly operating conversation to think in these terms. In an investigation of speech it is necessary to avoid, or at least be aware of, the tendency to analyse a primarily dynamic and temporally dependent form in terms of static and less context-dependent categories. So, although we can think of the sample in terms of an underlying structure which we are considering to be question-answer, the dynamically affected structure we are really interested in—the actual interchange—is rather more elaborate than this. 3 The degree of overlap which speakers find acceptable varies from culture to culture and language to language. It would be interesting to relate the possible differences in the representation of interaction by writers to the differences in conversational norms of their society. 4 In this case, the Oxford Concordance Programme (OCP).


NOTES 167

1 Page’s (1988) Speech in the English Novel remains a comprehensive and insightful starting point for study of this topic (see also Further reading). The brief sampling and discussion of fictional speech in relation to character which is contained in this chapter is far from comprehensive, but is intended to raise awareness of the status of fictional speech, and, as elsewhere, give some insights into the nature of spoken and written forms in general. 2 These divisions are not entirely exclusive, that is to say, a factor such as gender or age could also be listed under ‘Sociological features’, since it could be argued that they are as much to do with the individual in society (i.e. a person speaks/is spoken to in such and such a way because they are male or female, young or old and their society views these attributes in a particular way). Second, this division presents a rather static picture of a person’s speech profile, as if we were taking a section through a plant stem and looking at the structures which combine to produce the whole. However, like a plant, a speaker’s idiolect changes and develops through time, while retaining key features which provide it with identity. Physical characteristics of the vocal tract change as we age, and our voice may be affected by our state of health. Incidental features which do not normally affect idiolect, may, if they are particularly important to us, make us alter our way of speaking in a more long-term manner, for example if we meet people whom we admire and want to be accepted by we may gradually accommodate our language use towards theirs. 3 Some forms can appear directly in the written, such as technical terms in laboratory reports, which may never be actually spoken aloud in their full form. 4 These were gathered anonymously at various times, over a four-year period I spent as an examiner for an English language examination board. Therefore, the sample is fairly random with a good chance of any example being from a female or a male candidate, and the probability being that they were within a similar age range. The area of origin of the candidates was not known, but there is a high probability that they were not all from the same area of Britain, as scripts marked each year were from different locations. 5 Since our society does not have criteria for judging speaking that are as strongly developed as those for writing, it is hard to define a ‘well developed’ idiolect, but we can assume that in this sample most of the students would be able to communicate through the spoken channel, and would each have developed identifiable speech characteristics, both in terms of accent and typical speech patterns. 6 In other cases, there is evidence of a growing awareness of the requirements of the written channel, and the strange effect comes from an attempt to present something that ‘looks right’, but which is not a directly phonetic presentation: ‘perlight’ (polite); ‘ubrupte’ (abrupt); ‘browd spectriom’ (broad spectrum?); ‘goe’s’ (goes). These mistakes are suggestive of a slightly more sophisticated awareness of the distinctions which need to be made in the written channel. 7 The language of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a good example of the problem, since its near phonetic rendering of the strong northern dialect in the first edition foxes most readers completely, and this way of representing speech had to be toned down by sister Charlotte for later editions. 8 Interestingly the written version also shows a repetition of ‘to the’ in the form of a typographical error due to the speed with which the text is prepared and printed.

168 NOTES

4 ANALYSING SPEECH AND WRITING IN CONTEXT 1 Such added elements are usually sparked off by an event in the action or in the surrounding context, rather than being simply the personal opinion of the commentator on the action. Cricket commentators, who have to sustain interest over long periods of play, are a sure-fire source of such ‘padding’. (See Crystal and Davy (1969) for more general discussion of commentary.)

5 ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF SPEECH AND WRITING 1 Page numbers are for the 1983 translation. 2 Roman Jakobson addresses this issue in his remarks on representational and nonrepresentational signs: A manifold dichotomy of signs may be outlined. Primarily representational signs, which display a factual contiguity with their objects, prove to be mostly visual, in contradistinction to nonrepresentational signs, preponderantly auditory. The former deal foremost with space, the latter with time; simultaneity in the one case and successivity in the other is the principle structuring device. In contrast to the first semiotic type, the second implies a compulsorily hierarchical arrangement and discrete elementary components, conceived, selected and organised to serve a given purpose. (Jakobson 1964:219)

3 Householder (1971) uses a similar type of example when arguing for the logical primacy of writing. He states that if someone called ‘Kerr’ pronounced /ka:r/ decided to change the way the vowel sound was produced no one would bother. However, if they decided to change the spelling to ‘Karr’ they would have to have this legally recognised by society. 4 It is ironic, in this context, that the Cours was originally delivered to the world via the spoken channel in the form of lectures by Saussure, and that these were subsequently written up and published by his students. 5 A restatement of his image of ten years earlier in Language (Bloomfield 1935: 282). 6 The breaking of the link between letter and sound has the consequence of eliminating much of the distinction between ideographic and alphabetic writing systems. A written word, in both systems then becomes a unit representing an idea, rather than a series of marks which represent a sound which represents an idea. Nevertheless, Bloomfield does not accept this. Rather, he maintains that writing is essentially a means of conveying sounds. 7 The notion that speech is more ‘natural’ than writing has been criticised from the perspective of child language acquisition (Garton 1989).

NOTES 169

8 A view shared by Edward Sapir: ‘Even those who read and think without the slightest use of sound imagery are, in the last analysis, dependent on it’ (Sapir 1921: 19–20). 9 In fact the non-phonic nature of most writing was pointed out by David Abercrombie: The letters in which language is normally written do not represent more than a part of spoken language. Writing, of course, is perfectly intelligible without these missing ingredients. But then writing is a medium for language in its own right, and though it is, in the last analysis, constructed on the basis of spoken language, the aim of writing is not, usually, to represent actual spoken utterances which have occurred (quoted in Halliday 1989:31)

10 In the same collection Sylvain Bromberger points to the potential inconsistency in a science based on types (i.e. abstract entities) which is carried out via tokens (i.e. empirical information). How can we gain knowledge of these abstract entities when there appears to be no causal link between type and token? He posits a questionbased theory of the relationship between types and tokens, and concludes that the attribute of being a type is that ‘of being a type generated by the lexicon or grammar (whatever the case) in a speaker’s mind’ (Bromberger 1989:84). He points out that the methodological implication of this is that the study of natural languages ceases to be the same as the study of formal languages. 11 A point made well by Scriber and Cole (1981) who point to the influence of education methods. 12 The Olson/Goody perspective contrasts with that of Chomsky. The former states that our capacity for computation is increased/altered by the effects of literacy, the latter that our abilities are innate and independent of the context—the assistance of pen and paper will extend our memory, but not fundamentally alter our abilities. 13 Such issues are not unconnected with the subsidiary theme of this book. For instance, the very notion of there being sentence meaning as opposed to speaker meaning, or of non-context dependent meaning, may be a result of the application of a static, context free model to language. This type of model, I have suggested, is itself a product of the presence of the written form of language. By means of such a model we may be able to uncover structural relations, but will not throw light on aspects of meaning that are produced by the dynamic fluctuating transactions between speakers and hearers.

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Index

For further information on topics readers should also consult the Glossary (pp. 149– 64), and should refer to the sub-headings within the text as guidance on broader treatment of items. Numbers in bold represent the location of a sample used for analysis. abbreviation in speech 19, 25 abstraction in writing 28, 107, 119 academic discourse 13, 22, 27 accommodation 38, 41 ambiguity 37 aural/oral channel 5, 11, 12–14, 30, 59 aural reading 83–8, 92 authorial presence 75, 78–3, 97, 102–8, 111–17, 114, 115, 120

co-operation between speakers 15, 36–39, 41–5 corpus studies 141, 143 deletions made in transcription 56–56, 85– 91 discourse categories 53 discourse features: in speech 16–18, 22–5; in writing 29–2 diversity of speech 11–12, 69, 91 dominant speakers 15, 16–17, 25, 47–1

Case of the Tudor Queen, The 46–48, 47 change in language 65 channel 5–6, 5, 12–13, 14, 20, 24–8, 30, 34, 113, 128, 134, 136, 140, 142, 143, 144 cliché 113–18 cognition and writing 138–3 coherence in writing 3, 86 cohesion: in speech 141; in writing 91, 141–6 commentary 98–15, 98–4, 119, 121–6 conservatism of writing 11 context 93–122; of production 97, 106, 119; of reception 93, 97–3, 119–4 conventions: of speech representation 36, 46, 59–4, 84–9; of writing 66, 68, 69, 74, 91, 116 conversation 13, 14–22, 15, 24, 36, 38–2, 114, 119

ellipsis 18–1, 20, 26, 108, 119 emotion, representation of in writing 36, 44, 49–4 empirical approaches 125, 140–8 evaluative language 100–6, 106, 119 explicitness of writing 11, 34 fictional idiolect 67, 77–9, 91 fluency 23, 26 functions: of speech 94, 96, 134, 137; of writing 9, 26, 66, 94, 96, 134, 137 grammatical features: in speech 18–3, 23– 6; in writing 28–1, 88 ‘Hansard’ 52, 55–9, 58, 87, 89 hedges 24 hesitation 22, 30, 50–4, 52–6, 58–2, 102 humour 16, 45 174

INDEX 175

identity and language use 64, 67 ideology of speech representation 83–9, 92 idiolect 62, 63, 66, 69–8, 77, 85, 87; representation of 77–2, 85–91, 92 immediacy of speech 93, 99, 102, 107 impersonality of writing 11, 12, 14, 29, 49, 66, 74, 94, 142 implausibility of literary dialogue 43, 45 implicature 6–7 independence of writing 124, 125, 128, 129, 134–41 individual language use 11, 62–92 information, compression of in writing 27– 30 innovation 11 institutional speech 15 institutional writing 11, 68 interaction 12, 14, 20, 23, 26, 30, 34–61, 74, 92, 94, 114 juxtaposition 88, 91 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 42–7, language use and identity 64, 67 langue, la 125–31, 136 lexical features: in speech 22, 24, 25, 79, 103–11, 116–3, 137; in writing 27–28, 103–11, 116–3, 120, 137 linearity of speech 5, 5, 12 listeners 6–7, 15, 23, 29, 93, 97–3, 113, 115, 118 literary versus actual speech 16, 36, 42–51, 59–4, 74–77, 84–9, 91–6, 120 logic: of speech 88, 91; and writing 139 ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girlfriend’ 79, 80– 7, 80, 81 Martin Chuzzlewit 45–9 medium 5, 30, 38, 46, 68, 74, 93, 98, 111, 115, 118–3, 120 misunderstanding 41, 42, 45, 111–16 mode 6, 10, 11, 19, 20, 24, 30, 30–4, 67, 70–7, 94, 108, 119

narrative 100–6, 110 non-standard language 11, 19, 20, 71, 83, 90, 92 orthography 79, 83–9, 92, 127, 129, 132, 135 overlap between speakers 37, 39–3, 41, 50 parliamentary discourse 52–59, 54–9, 85– 91, 87, 89 parole 125–30 perception of speech 130, 133 performance, speech as 7, 25, 91 permanence of writing 3, 5, 8, 10, 125, 126, 128 personality, projection of in speech 12, 14– 16, 18, 25, 41, 59, 120 planning 15, 20, 69, 90, 102–8 preconceptions: regarding speech 41, 45–9, 59, 80; regarding writing 51 primacy of speech 124, 129 private discourse 11 production: of speech 25, 36; of writing 10, 30, 34–8, 74 pronunciation and spelling 83–9, 92 punctuation 3, 11, 143 radio broadcast 22, 25 reader expectation 16, 36, 49, 59–4, 84–9, 92 readers 3, 6, 7–8, 10, 29, 43, 46, 59–4, 67, 77, 84–9, 92, 93, 98, 113, 114, 118 reception: of speech 6–7, 25, 46; of writing 7, 10, 46 ‘recording’ property of writing 6, 9, 12, 59, 93, 124, 128 redundancy 26 referencing, systems of 88 repetition 25, 27–28, 39, 48, 81–6 representation: of emotion in writing 36, 44, 49–4; of idiolect 77–2, 85–91, 92; of speech (methods of) 78–3 response 6, 7, 14, 15, 17–18, 25 responsibility for utterance 38–2

176 INDEX

screen dialogue versus actual speech 94, 111–23, 120 sentence boundaries 88 speakers, overlap between 37, 39–3, 41, 50 speech: abbreviation in 19, 25; accretive nature of 38; actual versus literary 16, 36, 42–51, 58– 4, 74–77, 84–9, 91–6, 120; actual versus screen dialogue 94, 111– 23, 120; cohesion in 141; conventions of representation 36, 46, 59–4, 84–9; difficulties of comparison with writing 5, 8–9, 10, 12, 65, 66, 73–8, 93–96, 121, 123–8; discourse features in 16–18, 22–5; diversity of 11–12, 69, 91; editing in 25; functions of 94, 96, 134, 137; grammatical features in 18–3, 23–6; immediacy of 93, 99, 102, 107; institutional 15; lexical features in 22, 24, 25, 79, 103– 11, 116–3, 137; linearity of 5, 5, 12; logic of 88, 91; methods of representation 78–3; perception of 130, 133; as performance 7, 25, 91; preconceptions regarding 41, 45–9, 59, 80; projection of personality in 12, 14–16, 18, 25, 41, 59, 120; reception of 6–7, 25, 46; simplification in 112, 116–3; spontaneity of 14, 15, 25, 41, 59, 49–4, 97, 111; temporal aspects of 5, 5, 24–7, 38, 59, 102; token reduction in transcription of 52, 56, 85–87; transience of 5,10, 14, 16, 24–7, 126; value placed on 9, 70 speech sounds, writing and 126, 134, 135 spelling and pronunciation 83–9, 92 spoken mode features 30–3, 90–5, 92

spontaneity of speech 14, 15, 25, 41, 59, 49–4, 97, 111 stance 24, 26, 30 standard forms 11, 14, 89–4, 66–1, 83, 92 tag-questions 19–2, 20 tense 99–5, 110, 120 token reduction in transcribed speech 52, 56, 85–87 topic change 16–18, 24–7 transcription 5, 14–16, 52, 58, 85, 136 turn-taking 14, 36–38

Under the Volcano 52-4, 53, 54, 115-23, 115-16 value: placed on speech 9, 70; placed on writing 9, 30, 70 verbatim transcription 51, 52, 56, 59, 60, 128, 135, 136 visual/motoric channel 5, 6, 11, 12–13, 26, 30 vocalisation 129 voice-over 116 well-formedness 130 writing: abstraction in 28, 107, 119; as artefact 15, 25–8, 46, 49; and cognition 138–3; coherence in 3, 86; cohesion in 91, 141–6; conservatism of 11; conventions of 66, 68, 69, 74, 91, 116; denigration of 126, 128, 130; difficulties of comparison with speech 5, 8–9, 10, 12, 65, 66, 73–8, 93–96, 121, 123–8; discourse features in 29–2; explicitness of 11, 34; functions of 9, 26, 66, 94, 96, 134, 137; grammatical features in 28–1, 88; impersonality of 11, 12, 14, 29, 49, 66, 74, 94, 142; independence of 124, 125, 128, 129, 134–41; institutional 11, 68;

INDEX 177

lexical features in 27–28, 103–11, 116– 3, 120, 137; and logic 139; non-oral nature of 26, 36; permanence of 3, 5, 8, 10, 125, 126, 128; preconceptions regarding 51; reception of 7, 10, 46; ‘recording’ property of 6, 9, 12, 59, 93, 124, 128; representation of emotion in 36, 44, 49– 4; and speech sounds 126, 134, 135; static nature of 3, 24–7, 26; tangible nature of 124, 125, 126; as translation 134; value placed on 9, 30, 70 written form: influence of 5, 8–9, 124–37, 138–4; in relation to ‘language’ 124–37 written mode features 30–4 written sign, the 125, 134

English in Speech and Writing: Investigating Language and Literature (Interface (London, England).)

Investigating English Discourse: Language, Literacy and Literature

England, Their England: Commentaries on English Language and Literature

Medieval English: Literature and Language

Speech and Writing

Language Change (Intertext (London, England).)

Speech and Language Processing

Speech and language processing

Language and Speech Processing

Language and Space (Language, Speech, and Communication)

Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Language, Discourse, Society)

The Language of Magazines (Intertext (London, England).)

The Language of Work (Intertext (London, England).)

The Language of Television (Intertext (London, England).)

Construal (Language, Speech, and Communication)

Pattern Recognition in Speech and Language Processing

Pattern Recognition In Speech And Language Processing

Pattern Recognition in Speech and Language Processing

Speech And Language (Gray Matter)

Speech And Language (Gray Matter)

Ethics in Speech and Language Therapy

Scientific Thinking in Speech and Language Therapy

Language Through Literature: An Introduction (Interface)

Language Through Literature: An Introduction (Interface)

Language Form and Language Function (Language, Speech, and Communication)

English Literature and Composition

Literature and Complaint in England 1272-1553

Studies in English Language and Literature: Doubt Wisely

Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use

English in Speech and Writing: Investigating Language and Literature (Interface (London, England).)

Investigating English Discourse: Language, Literacy and Literature

England, Their England: Commentaries on English Language and Literature

Medieval English: Literature and Language

Speech and Writing

Language Change (Intertext (London, England).)

Speech and Language Processing

Speech and language processing

Language and Speech Processing

Language and Space (Language, Speech, and Communication)

Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Language, Discourse, Society)

The Language of Magazines (Intertext (London, England).)

The Language of Work (Intertext (London, England).)

The Language of Television (Intertext (London, England).)

Construal (Language, Speech, and Communication)

Pattern Recognition in Speech and Language Processing

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