Think back to the 80s, to the time when the ‘answerphone’ was still only halfway to becoming the ‘ansaphone’. Would you say that the language that callers used in their messages was spoken or written? At a recent workshop a participant told us that when she heard the answerphone voice she rang off, wrote her message on a piece of paper, re-dialled and read out what she had in front of her! Her message was oral in medium but written in terms of its thought process and probably its grammar. As this shows, it is not always easy to know whether a stretch of language is oral or written.

What are the general characteristics of these two manifestations of human language?　

Spoken	Written
immensely ancient	comparatively recent
the primary form of language	the secondary form
universal among humans	an attribute of wealth
acquired/invented by age 5	learned by puberty, if at all
quantitatively the major form	quantitatively the minor form
carries people‘s interactive emotional life	in the First World carries knowledge and information
carries internal monologue and dialogue	is often public
dominated by women/ mothers	is frequently in the male domain
has low prestige in the First World	has high prestige in the First World
dies without trace	dies but leaves traces
modifies rapidly	modifies more slowly
grammar codification just beginning (in English)	grammar encoded in various systems
paralinguistic features include pitch, volume, resonance, speed and bodily gesture	paralinguistic features reduced to punctuation, handwriting or typeface
largely spontaneous	largely pre-meditated
opportunity for repair and paraphrase	no immediate opportunity to monitor reader feedback and effect repair

Before reading on, please think of all the other distinctions between the two forms that I have failed to mention.

The grammar of spoken English

The grammar we teach from coursebooks is often a simplification (at worst a perversion of the grammar) of written English. It is paradoxical that we should be working from a version of written grammar and yet have our students’ oral competence as our main conscious aim. A common enough spoken (or written!) sentence such as ‘She told me she’ll be here tonight‘ is considered to be ’wrong‘ because it mixes the three conditionals for which we have been given strict rules. Research at Nottingham University (by Carter and McCarthy) shows clearly that the English of conversation has a grammar very different from that of the written language. Here is an example:

In the written language, if reporting takes place in the past the reporting verb will be in the Past Simple: She told me that...

In spoken conversational genre, as opposed to spoken narrative genre, the reporting verb will typically be in the Past Continuous: She was telling me that...

This form implies that I have a relationship with the speaker. One of the most important discoveries by Carter and McCarthy is that you cannot describe the grammar of spoken English without constant reference to the relationship between speakers. In their growing description of the oral language, speaker relationship has a major value as a grammatical variable. This is unlikely to be found in a coursebook.

The grammar of written English

The Collins Cobuild project has provided us with a description of written English from large amounts of data that now allows me to teach my students things that I would never have thought of teaching them fifteen years ago. Let me give an example:

Fifteen years ago I would have taught them verbs like to kick and to kiss, but I would have omitted to show them the marvellous flexibility of English in sentences like:

She gave him a tender kiss

She gave him a vicious kick

The Cobuild Grammar calls give a ’delexical‘ verb; it simply gives verb force to the nouns kiss and kick. Thanks to corpus linguistics we can now teach the grammar of the written language more fully and concentrate on the most commonly-used language because the statistics tell us how prevalent structures are.

The cline between speaking and writing

Maybe the best way to deal with these two manifestations of language is to think of very different text-types as lying along the cline from very spoken to very written.

Where on the continuum would you place the following:

Mother’s baby talk - a legal report in a newspaper - a chat show on TV or radio - a personal letter - a World Wide Web message

Do you find the same difficulty with languages you know, or is the fuzziness surrounding these choices peculiar to English? If you have thoughts on this please write and share your views.