Speaking and writing English

Abstract

The study of spoken English is exciting, challenging, and controversial: exciting, because new and unexpected constructions keep turning up; challenging, because some syntactic constructions of spoken language resist analysis; controversial, because not all researchers recognize the study of spoken language as legitimate, far less its results. The very title of this chapter is controversial, since spoken language tout court does not differ from written language and analysts recognize genres or dimensions applying to both speech and writing (see Section 27.5). Nonetheless, spontaneous spoken language (Miller Weinert 1998) or conversation (Greenbaum and Nelson 1995a) is very different from other genres and that is the focus of this chapter.