The Spoken Language: what is it and why is it important

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The Spoken Language what is it and why is it
important?

• Ronald Carter
• University of Nottingham, UK

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The CANCODE spoken corpus (5m words)

• Cambridge
• And
• Nottingham
• Corpus
• Of
• Discourse in
• English

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Facts and figures

• Using a corpus gives us useful statistics about
• frequency
• differences between spoken and written grammar
• social and contextual aspects

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You know

• In the spoken language, 60 of all examples of
  know occur in the phrase you know.
• Well, what can I say, you know, I want my career
  to go far.

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You know

• You know is the 57th most frequent item in the
  whole language, spoken and written

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You know

• You know is used by speakers of all ages and all
  backgrounds in a wide range of situations.

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Vague Language

• do you think it is affected by your faith,
  like you were saying you mm, right, yeah
  have any kind of moral standards or not, like
  hooliganising and stuff, I mean, do you think
  thats because ofof your faith or do you think
  thats because, well, because of society or
  whatever?
• Overlaps and interruptions.
• Vague language is purposeful and strategic.

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Just

• Just is six times more frequent in spoken
  language than in written.
• People use just to soften what they say and make
  it less direct.
• Could you just have a look at this?
• Can I just ask you something?

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Things occur together

• Question Dyou think youve made a difference in
  the world?
• I dont know. I try. I, you know, I just can
  only hope that erm when Im dead and gone they
  might appreciate it a little bit more, do you
  know what I mean? Sometimes that happens.

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So

• So is becoming more common these days in contexts
  such as
• That phone is SO last week
• I was SO not ready to take an exam
• You are SO going to get into trouble
• This is so not what we were taught!

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Like

• The use of like to introduce speech is
  overwhelmingly confined to younger speakers.
• I was like Dont come near me!

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Headers

• In conversation, people have no difficulty
  understanding things such as
• His cousin in London, her boyfriend, his parents
  bought him a car for his birthday
• These are not found in writing.

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Tails

• Shes a very good swimmer, Jenny is.
• Its difficult to eat isnt it, spaghetti?
• Were going to have steak and fries, we are.
• It can leave you feeling very weak, it can,
  though, apparently, shingles,cant it?

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Another public speaker example

• And my grandmother, Ive never forgotten, when we
  were small, my sister and I, she used to take us
  down and wed sing to the seals. It was
  absolutely riveting, wed sing Over the Sea to
  Skye and these heads would bob up and start
  coming closer.

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Good or bad?

• What happens is that there are 15 members of the
  Security Council, there's five permanent members
  and the five permanent members have got the veto.
  

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Formality and English grammar

• So there I was sitting in Mick Jaggers kitchen
  while he went about making us both afternoon tea.
  Well, you can imagine how long it took to get him
  to talk about the bands latest album. Exactly.
  Youve got it. Over two minutes. (The Daily
  Telegraph Magazine 19/9/2002).

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Cont.

• Every previous visit had left me with a sense of
  the futility of further action on my part.
• Whenever Id visited there before, Id ended up
  feeling that it would be futile if I tried to do
  anything more.

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Summary

• -Writers orientate more towards norms speakers
  orient towards each other
• -Writing is more off-line speech is more online
• -Speech has a different punctuation.
• -Speaking and listening are interactive skills
• -Spoken language
• absence of sentencesincomplete
  utterancesjointly produced utterances flexible
  structures small words are significant
• -Literacy and oracy and spoken SE.

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Summary (cont) Some issues for Education

• -Talking your way into understanding.
• -Talk and metatalk.
• -Talking for different audiences.
• -Talk into writing.
• -Talking through two (or more) languages.
• -Verbal play, voicing and creativity.

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Further Reading
Biber, D et al, The Longman Grammar of Spoken and
Written English (Longman, 1999)Carter, R. and
McCarthy, M. Cambridge English Grammar A
Comprehensive Guide to Spoken and Written
Grammar and Usage (CUP, 2006)Cornbleet, S and
Carter, R. The Language of Speech and Writing
(Routledge, London, 2001)Halliday, M.A.K.
Spoken and Written Language (OUP Oxford,
1989)Pridham, F The Language of Conversation
(Routledge, London, 2001) Maybin, J. Childrens
Voices Talk Knowledge and Identity (Palgrave,
2006) QCA (2004) The Grammar of Talk