Why Study Grammar?
(Part 2)
Grammar
and Contextual Variation
1. Spoken and Written Modes: An Overview
Variations in context that can affect grammatical choice may relate to different modes of communication, such as whether it is speech or writing, telephone or email, and so on. This text is communicating with you now through the written mode. The writer has no idea where the reader is or what is motivating them to look at it. They don’t know if the reader is alone, inside, outside, whether it is morning, afternoon or evening. To make their meanings clear to the reader, the writer types words into a computer that fit together in strings of phrases and clauses with boundaries marked by full stops and initial capital letters. They try to make what they write as clear as possible because the reader does not have the chance to ask for clarification.
If the reader were sitting with the writer in their study and together were discussing grammar, most of the communication would be oral, though the two might also make use of various reference books on the shelves. There would be no full stops or capital letters in anyone’s speech. Instead there would be a stream of sounds, some of which would receive greater emphasis than others. The sounds would be broken up with pauses and often speakers would stop part way through and start to rephrase their thoughts. While the two are talking, each would be looking at the other to make sure that they have understood what has been said. Speakers would automatically be monitoring the other’s gestures, such as a nodding of the head to indicate understanding or a furrowing of the brow to indicate non-comprehension. One might interrupt the other and ask them to say something again or retell something in their own words to check their understanding.
In this way, the inherent difference of face-to-face communication and written communication creates different contexts which tend to lead people to communicate meanings differently through making different grammatical choices. The way one person speaks and writes is different from the way another speaks and writes. However, the way one person speaks is probably closer to the way another speaks (if you are a native speaker of English) than to the way either of them write. Put a different way, language varies for each individual, but it varies in systematic ways in different situations. So the language choices we make when we write will show similarities because the mode is writing and not speech.
To start thinking about what the study of grammar can tell us about these systematic variations, let us consider the following two bits of language which come from some longer texts which you will read shortly.
1. So she piles her in the car and they go off.
2. Since 1840, maximum life expectancies have increased at a rate of about three months per year.
One of these is spoken and the other is written. You can probably guess that (1) is spoken and (2) is from a written text. What clues are you using to make this judgment? What choices have the speaker in (1) and the writer in (2) made that enable you to identify one as speech and the other as writing? You might say that (2) is more formal and (1) less formal. If you know some grammatical terminology, you might relate this to the long noun phrases like maximum life expectancy in (2) and the less formal ‘phrasal verbs’ such as pile in and go off in (1). In writing we often consider more carefully the words we use. We have time to plan and revise what we have to say to fit in with the meanings we want to convey and the person or people we are addressing. In speech we often do not consider our words so carefully, particularly in casual conversation. However, we are still making choices about how to express ourselves – just so quickly that we rarely have time to reflect on it.
The speaker in (1) probably based her selection of informal-sounding phrasal verbs on the basis that she knew the friend she was talking to well. Or perhaps she thought that those choices would add to the contrast between the everydayness of the activities she was describing and what she was about to say next. Most of our language choices are subconscious choices, but they are nevertheless motivated. There must be a reason why you chose one word or expression and not another. One of the factors influencing this choice is whether or not we are in face-to-face contact with the person we are communicating with. While this is a major influence on variation in grammatical choices it is not the only one. There are many factors which influence our choices and this unit will help you to see what some of these are.
2. Spoken and Written Modes: A Comparison
One of the most significant factors affecting our grammatical choices is whether we are speaking or writing. We can see these differences if we compare a spoken text and a written text. Text here is not being used in its usual sense to mean a piece of writing. ‘Text’ in language analysis can refer both to speech which has been prepared in a written form that can be analysed and to writing.
Activity 1 (30 minutes)
Read Texts 1 and 2 below. Which do you think is spoken language and which written? Make a list of the differences between them that indicate to you that one is a written text and one is a spoken text. Don’t worry about using grammatical terminology to describe things – just make notes that mean something to you.
Text 1
A friend of mine told me this amazing story the other day she a … she’d been shopping and she came back to this multi-storey car park that she’s been in and it was kind of deserted … erm … and as she was walking towards her car she saw this figure sitting in the passenger seat … and she thought what’s that I’ve been burgled and as she walked towards the car feeling a bit scared this person got out of the car and it was a little old lady… so she thought oh well probably it’s not a burglar and … er … anyway she asked her and the woman said … er … apparently she’d been sitting there waiting for her daughter to arrive and the daughter hadn’t turned up and she was feeling a bit giddy and faint and so she went and sat in the car … it seems a very strange thing to do … I mean … apparently she’d been trying all the door handles one was open so she sat in it … so anyway… this friend of mine … erm … said … you know … what are you going to do now … when are you meant to be meeting your daughter and the woman said half an hour ago so she said well … what are you going do now and anyway … finally this woman asked her if … er … she could possibly give her a lift home because it was freezing and this old lady looked really ill and my friend thought oh … I’d better be nice and it was a bit out of her way but she thought she’d better do the … do the … do the right thing … so she piles her in the car and they go off … and as they’re driving along she just happens to look across and sees her hands … and they weren’t woman’s hands at all … they were man’s hands … it’s got hairy big hairy hands…
(Brazil, 1995, pp. 24–5)
Text 2
Industrialized societies throughout the world are greying. Since 1840, maximum life expectancies have increased at a rate of about three months per year and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. The good news is that people are getting healthier. But one downside is the net impact on healthcare. The overall improvement in health is more than countered by the much greater number of individuals reaching ages at which age-related health problems occur. An obvious example is Alzheimer’s disease, which was almost unknown a century ago. The same is true of age-related macular degeneration, now the leading cause of blindness. Ageing is bad for us and yet it happens to everyone. So why does it occur at all?
(Partridge and Gems, 2002, p. 921)
Comment
There are many differences between these two texts that you might have noted. Let us look at just a few of them. To start with, Text 1 looks very different from language that you normally see written down and this is the first clue to the fact that it was originally spoken, not written. It is a transcript, a written version of something that someone has said. This is a very simple transcript, partly because there is only one speaker and partly because of the way it has been transcribed.
There are many different ways of representing spoken language on a page. In this transcription many of the features that we associate with written language are missing. There are no sentences or paragraphs, for instance. Three full stops (an ellipsis) are used to indicate gaps or pauses, not sentence endings. It is consequently difficult at first to make sense of what is said and to guess how it sounded.
The speaker repeats parts of utterances, e.g. she’d better do the … do the … do the right thing and hesitates, e.g. er, erm and pauses. (The word ‘utterance’ is used in preference to ‘sentence’ because, as we shall see, the notion of a sentence does not fit neatly with describing spoken language.) The utterances often seem incomplete or to change direction as they proceed, e.g.
anyway she asked her and the woman said … er … apparently she’d been sitting there waiting for her daughter to arrive, and there are changes in verb tenses, e.g. but she thought she’d better do the … do the … do the right thing …so she piles her in the car and they go off.
The string of events in the story are linked predominately by and, e.g.
…apparently she’d been sitting there waiting for her daughter to arrive and the daughter hadn’t turned up and she was feeling a bit giddy and faint and so she went and sat in the car.
Many of the features of Text 1 are in direct contrast to Text 2 where the meanings are divided into sentences. Sentences and parts of sentences are linked together not predominately by and, but by other linking words such as but, yet and so which not only link bits of text but give us an idea of the logical unfolding of a text. One of the most significant differences between speech and writing is the amount of information that is packed into written texts in relation to the number of words used.
We can demonstrate this through looking at the following sentence from Text 2.
Written. The overall improvement in health is more than countered by the much greater number of individuals reaching ages at which age-related health problems occur.
Imagine how you might convey all that information in speech. If I were in a seminar discussing this I think I might say something like:
Spoken variant 1. There’s been an improvement in health generally but at the same time this has led to problems … more people are living into old age and this is when they start to have illness and diseases that are only associated with being old.
But if I were talking to friends it might be more like:
Spoken variant 2. Health’s getting better yeah overall … more people are living longer … but but the problem is the problem is they’re not as well … they’ve got lots of diseases and stuff … things that you get when you’re old.
In (spoken variant 1) I have used 42 words (I am counting contracted forms such as they’re as one word) and in (spoken variant 2) 36 words to say what took 24 words in the written text. How we convey all this information in a relatively few words is one of the main grammatical differences between speech and writing, especially between informal conversation and formal writing.
Both formality and whether something is spoken or written can affect the choice of grammatical structures and also the choice of vocabulary. For example, the noun improvement in (written) is replaced by a verb and an adverb in (spoken 2):’s getting better. Vocabulary differences can also be seen: for example, the word individuals in (written) is replaced by people in (spoken 1) and (spoken 2).
The technical word for vocabulary is lexis, and this is combined with the word grammar in the term lexicogrammar. In this unit our primary focus is on grammar, but it is important to realise that it is often the choices of both lexis and grammar, i.e. lexicogrammar, that convey the meanings we make with language.