Introduction

In the preceding chapters I have explored the distribution of pronouns and full NPs in written (expository) and conversational (non-narrative) English. In this chapter I present a comparison of the anaphoric patterns found in the conversational and written texts, including same- and different-gender environments. Before beginning the presentation, however, a note about past research on the differences between spoken and written language is in order.

Theories of the differences between spoken and written language

A fair amount of attention has been directed recently to the differences in syntactic structure exhibited by the two modalities (see, for example, Keenan and Bennett 1977; Ochs 1979b; Chafe 1982; Biber 1983; Akinnaso 1982; O'Donnell 1974; Tannen 1982; Rubin 1980). Claims have been made that written texts tend to be characterized by greater complexity of syntactic structure (greater use of nominalizations and complex verb structures, for example), more frequent use of subordination, and a predominance of subject–predicate structure rather than topic–comment (or reference–proposition); that is, in general there seems to be a greater degree of what Chafe (1982) calls syntactic integration in written texts than in spoken texts.

It should be noted at this point that the characteristics of spoken and written language that have been studied are surface phenomena that can be counted, and from which contrastive frequencies can be given.