Title C3 - STANDARDS ACROSS CHANNELS ✅

C3. STANDARDS ACROSS CHANNELS Channels: spoken and written channels both traditional and electronic. SPEECH AND WRITING - When people talk about ‘standard English’, they generally have the written channel in mind. - However, the inappropriateness of evaluating English speech on the basis of writing has become increasingly apparent with the growth in the past two decades in the number and size of corpora containing authentic speech, such as the BNC (British National Corpus), COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database), and CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English). - Baron (2000: 21–22) discusses three dif erent approaches to speech/writing differences, the Opposition View, the Continuum View, and the Cross-over View. a. THE OPPOSITION VIEW - Speech and writing have the dichotomous characteristics. b. THE CONTINUUM VIEW - Speech and writing occur at various points on a continuum
c. THE CROSS-OVER VIEW - “Merely because a linguistic message looks as if it's designed to be spoken or written hardly ensures that will be the medium through which everyone experiences it” (Baron 2000: 22). - Audio books: spoken or written? - Texts of lectures available as videos: spoken or written? ● Leech et al. (1982): Typical speech vs. Typical writing → reconcile opposition and continuum views
- Here is a transcribed conversation (from Crystal and Davy 1975, reproduced in Leech et al. 1982). Speaker A, a mother, is describing the family holiday to speaker B. Look back to Leech et al. s lists of features of typical speech and typical writing and see how many of them are exemplified in the transcript. - For example, inexplicitness (1) occurs in lines 8/9 (‘and all this’), non-fluency (5) occurs in line 4 (‘er’), and monitoring (6) in line 1 (‘sort of’). Because this is a transcript, there is no punctuation, bar vertical lines are used to indicate units of intonation (‘tone units’ or ‘word groups’) and dashes to indicate pauses. The items in round brackets in A's turn are B's responses to her. - Since the late 1980s, computerized database corpora have been demonstrating in increasing detail the ways in which speech operates according to its own grammatical rules, with writing tending “to reflect earlier norms while speech commonly embodies innovation” (Baron 2000: 95). - The work of Carter and McCarthy for CANCODE, for example, has provided useful evidence of the grammar of spoken (British) English.
⇒ Heads (or ‘left dislocation’) Heads are nouns or noun phrases that are brought to the front of a clause to identify them for the listener as the most important part of the message. They are then repeated with a pronoun in the clause that follows. In the above examples, the heads are (a) ‘Jamie’, (b) ‘That chap over there’, and (c) ‘The women in the audience’. ⇒ Tails (or ‘reinforcement’) Tails parallel heads by repeating the subject of the preceding clause in order to amplify and reinforce what has been said. They thus tend to serve an affective function by showing the speaker’s attitude towards his or her subject. The tails in the above examples are (a) ‘pasta’, (b) ‘kids’, and (c) ‘that wine’. ⇒ Ellipsis simply means omission. It refers specifically to the omission of items in a grammatical structure which go unnoticed in speech but which would be required in a written text. The items that are omitted are those that are retrievable from either the immediate situation or from the surrounding text (i.e. the ‘cotext’). In the example dialogue, the ellipted items are: I’ve (got an awful cold); I’ve (just seen Paco); He said (nothing); It’s (interesting, isn’t it?).