English in Speech and Writing

Investigating Language and Literature

Rebecca Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134802654
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this activity-based text, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differences between spoken and written English. Instead of presenting a bewildering array of 'facts' about variety in English, she encourages the reader to actively investigate the differences between these two modes of communication by comparing actual speech patterns with literary ones. This indispensable guide to the basic methods of analysis provides both an overview of the relationship between speech and writing and an introduction to a central theoretical issue in language studies. By the end of the book, readers will have had the opportunity to consider material from an extensive selection of spoken and written varieties - including boxing commentaries, detective novels and film scripts - while being encouraged to formulate their own opinions with regard to lexis and structure. In addition, the tasks that have been incorporated into the end of every chapter provide suggestions for further self-study and follow-up work.

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 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.

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 tape-recorder. 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, expresssome 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 numb...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 PROPERTIES OF SPEECH AND WRITING
• CHAPTER 2 INTERACTIONS ON THE PAGE
• CHAPTER 3 INDIVIDUALS IN SPEECH AND WRITING
• CHAPTER 4 ANALYSING SPEECH AND WRITING IN CONTEXT
• CHAPTER 5 ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF SPEECH AND WRITING
• APPENDIX APPROACHING LANGUAGE ANALYSIS: A BRIEFBEGINNERS’ GUIDE AND GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• REFERENCES