Introduction

In the last two units we have been concerned almost exclusively with written texts. Now it is time to look briefly at the analysis of examples of naturally occurring spoken language, particularly in its most common and informal variety, conversation.

Tasks

1 Spoken language

First of all, how is speech different from writing? Here is a transcription of part of a conversation (from the Cambridge English Corpus). What features distinguish it as spoken and not written language? (<S1> = the first speaker; <S2> = the second speaker.)

<S1>Go ahead. Tell your story.

<S2>Okay. And um so I really didn’t know anything about this girl. Just knew she was about my age and what she looked like just from looking at her and and uh so I asked my friends about her like what they knew about her and stuff. I did my homework. So for about a month we were just going to this place and I would find out – force my friends to go so I can go see her even though I never said a word to her though. Just looked at her and made sure she noticed me as I was looking at her. So um during that time my friends and I would just go to uh really like I said we didn’t really hang out too much so when we did we’d go we’d hang out Sunday nights in a near town town slash city and go to like a club and just dance the night away.

2 Interaction

The conversation extract in the previous task was mainly monologue, but, of course, most spoken language is more interactive than that. Hence spoken grammar includes a number of features that result from its interactional nature. In the following extract from the Cambridge English Corpus, can you identify the purpose of the underlined elements?

<S1>I told you about this job right?

<S2>I think so.

<S1>This tutoring online tutoring job yeah okay. Cool.

<S2>Yeah yeah yeah yeah. That seems like a positive thing.

<S1>Yeah I’ve done all my training.

<S2>Mm-hmm.

<S1>And I think it will be bearable.