Differences between spoken and written discourse Aspect Grammatical intricacy Spoken discourse Rebuttal view - Hallidays view:

Spoken discourse has its own complexity and has the feature of grammatical intricacy. - Halliday points out that clauses in spoken discourse can be much more spread out than written. General view: Content words tend to spread out in over a number of clauses - General view: low level of nominalization and shorter noun groups in spoken discourse - Rebuttal view: Both can be explicit depending on what they want listener or reader to understand, and how direct they wish to be. -General view: Speech depends on a shared situation and background for interpretation. - Rebuttal view: Spoken genres (e.g. academic lectures) do not generally show a high dependence on shared context Spontaneity -General view: Speaking is disorganized and ungrammatical - topics can change and speaker can interrupt and overlap with each other as they speak. - speakers can ask for clarification and they can correct what they have said. -Rebuttal view: Speaking Written discourse General view: Writing is more structurally complex and elaborate than speech

Lexical density (i.e. ratio of content words to grammatical/function words) Nominalization (i.e. actions/events are presented as nouns rather than verbs) Explicitness

-General view: Content words being tightly packed into individual clauses - More content words than function words - General view: Include longer noun groups than spoken texts - Information in written text is more tightly packed - General view: writing is more explicit than speech

Contextualization

- General view: writing is more decontextualized than writing. -Rebuttal view: certain text (e.g. fiction and nonfiction) depends on background information supplied by reader to allow reader to enter into the world of text. - General view: Writing is more organized and grammatical. - only see the finished product - written discourse is more constrained in that ways of conveying meaning are more limited

Repetition, hesitation and redundancy

Continuum view

is organized but organized differently from writing -spoken is produced spontaneously and we are able to see the process of its production as someone speaks (how it is organized). - General view: Speaking uses much more repetition, hesitation and redundancy than written discourse. - produced in real time, with speakers working out what they want to say at the same time as they are saying it. -uses more pauses and fillers like hhh, er and you know to give time to think what they are going to say. McCarthy (2001) -the differences are seen as being scale, or continuum (e.g. from texts which are more involved interpersonally to texts which are more detached) -avoid over-simplified distinctions between speech and writing -speaking and writing draw on the same underlying grammatical system but encode meaning in different ways Biber (1988) - there is no absolute differences between speech and writing in English - dimension of variation where linguistic features tend to cluster (structure), all of which varies for different kinds of texts/genres - variation occurs within particular genres -speaking and writing have a number of features in common such as linguistic features may cluster in text that share similar in conversation - a number of characteristics show differences such as style and type of genres. - spoken and written styles may intermingle with each other where spoken language may also occur in written language such as email messages, informal letter.