Differences between spoken and written discourse

Aspect
Grammatical intricacy

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

Contextualization

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.

Written discourse
General view: Writing is
more structurally complex
and elaborate than speech

-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

- 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

-Rebuttal view: Speaking

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.