. : mul om ase English sss ' Bee Ce a 4 Language e pet AS Edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill, Ruth Wodak and Tony McEnery caoSelection Introduction © Jonathan Culpeper, Frenis Kata, Paul Kes Ruth Wocal and Tony Mefnery 2009, Inavldul chapters © Contributors All its reserved No reproduction, copy ar rnsmision ofthis Publication may be made without wilfen permission. ‘No portion of this publication may be rapraduce, copied or rensmited s2v8 with written permission or in accordance with the provisions ofthe Copyright. Design and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of ery Ueence Betmiting ite copying isued bythe Copyright Licensing Agency, Sofron House 6-10 Kirby Stes, London ECIN Br ‘Any person who does any unauther2ed actin relation to this publication ‘may be ible to criminal prosecution and cl esi for damages ‘The authors have aserted thelr rights to be denied as the authors of his work in accordance with the Copyright, Designe and Patencs et 1888, Fist published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgyave Macmillan Inthe UKs an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, cornpany nurse 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R621 XS. Palgrave Macmillan inthe USic a dision of t Martin's Pres Lic 175 Fifth Aver, New York NY 10010, Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint ofthe above companies ‘nd hes companies and reprasentatves thoughout the wot, Falgrave® and Macmillan ae registered trademasinthe United Sttes, the United Kingdom, Europe and other counties: 1sBN-13: 9781403945891 hardback |SON-10:1-4038-4565-5 hardback ISBN-13:972-1—4038-4590-7 naperback ISBN-10; -4035~4590-x paperback Tas books printed on paper sultable for recycing and made from fully ‘managed and sustained forest sures. Logging pulping and manufactring Process are expected to conform tothe enitonmental regulations of te ountry of eign A catalogue record for this books availabe from the British brary. A catalog record fortis book i aval from the Library of Congress. woe7654324 1817 15 15 14 1312.17 10.09 Printed and bound in Gest Britain by ‘CP Antony Rowe, Chippenhar and Eastbourne iAnprew Wiison tion 23.1 Medium versus discourse type in language v: We all probably have an intuition that people tend, on the whole, to write differently from the way that they speak. But how far can we account for this in terms of the medium itself (L., speech vs. writing) and how far is it a consequence of situational features (e.g., the level of formality or the overall purpose of the text)? Consider first of all the following extract from a real-life conversation between two teenage girls (the markers

and

bracket stretches of overlapping speech) KATH: — We were having a sly fag in the ladies. I thought oh my God, my God, my God he’s gonna smell it on me. He knows T smoke anyway so it’s not a prob well not really CLAIRE: KATH: — I know he knows. We were having a massive a-- er conversa~ tion the other night about smoking, he was going oh well you know, you smoking are you, I went why, he goes oh we found, found a box of matches in your er top I went oh no no no, it’s just for, for the joss sticks, yeah. He went yeah alright. I mean Ive, I've smoked cos I was in France with him last year erm sitting at the erm dinner table smoking a cigar with him

and my uncle

CLAIRE:

Urghl

KATH: [like cigars. CLAIRE: Rough. KATH: — Only the thin ones, the massive chunky ones are rough. (BNC Text KPH 1216) ‘The most characteristic features of this spoken text can be summarized under three broad headings. (Degree of fluency and planning Many of the features in the text are connected with the fact that it is com- posed in real time - what we might also call the stream of consciousness. Writing and Discourse Type426 + ENGLISH WRITING: STYLE, GENRE AND PRACTICE ‘This means that each word is uttered only shortly after being called to mind: pre-planning of stretches of language is minimal, and the speaker has no pos- ibility to go back and edit them before placing them into the awareness of the heazer, Consequently, we see various types of retraction ~ that is, going back on what has just been said - such as postposed hedging phrases (wvell not really) and incomplete words (as in the phrase a massive a-- er conversa tion, where we guess that the speaker was originally going to say argument rather than conversation). When the speaker needs time to think, she may make use of pauses, either silent ones (marked by in the transcript) or what we call filled pauses (particles such as er and erm). Alternatively, she may, $0 to speak, ‘go into autopilot’ and keep repeating the same word whilse she thinks of what to say next: we see several examples of this in the extract, In grammatical terms, we see relatively little in the way of complex sentence structures but mostly a sequence of very short independent clauses. (On planning and fluency sce, for example, Goldman-Eisler, 1968; and a very thoough recent review by Eklund, 2004.) (i) Level of formality ‘A second, rather smaller set of features concerns the level of formality of the text, We ean judge it to be quite an informal text, It tends to make use of contractions rather than full forms for example, gonna rather than going to and cos in place of because ~ and it also employs mostly informal vocabulary: fag (instead of cigarette), to go (instead of to say), and yeah. (iit) Interactional features ‘The final set of features are 2 direct result of the fact that this is an interactive text. The most of important of these are the presence of turn-taking between the two speakers and the two occurrences of overlapping speech. Now consider the following piece of written language, taken from an unpublished short story: Sara was a heavy smoker and after twenty minutes’ ride she was longing for another cigarette. Reaching a quiet glade, she dismounted, took out her silver cigarette case, and lit up one of her Turkish cigarettes. As she inhaled the smoke deeply into her lungs, she heard a low moaning noise coming from the trees. What could it be? She dropped her cigarette on the ground, rushed it out with her shiny riding boot, and removed from her pocket the small pistol she always carried with her for protection. The zisk from petty criminals was ever present in this industrial metropolis. ‘This clearly feels quite different in style from. the conversation, so Iet us look at what exactly is distinctive in it. To help systematize the comparison, we shall use the same set of headings. (Degree of fluency and planning “This text contains no examples of filled or silent pauses, nor does it contain any incomplete words or retraction. There is some degree of repetition — for| SPEECH, WRITING AND DISCOURSE TYPE + 427 Sample, the word cigarettes) is repeated four times Here, however, the [fbrated words do not come immediately after one another, as they did in the fist passage. In other words, this repetition eee Rot seem to serve the purpose of ‘playing for time’ as the author gathers hig thoughts, but is simply giruice for continuing the progression of a theme ae several sentences, ort Srammatical structures are also more comples to instance, we have Sramples of subordinate clauses being fronted beince wer main clause (e.g., as she inhaled...) which requires a certain amoure advance planning, Two Frade ats also exhibit the tricolon’ structure from format thetoric: they are frade up of three main clauses of increasing length, for example: she dis- erpetted 2 words), took out her silver cigarette cass {6 words), and lit up one of her Turkish cigarettes (8 words). (See Chapess 8, Section 8.6 for discussion (i) Level of formality The vocabulary is more formal than that of the conversation. For example, There re poine tlatively obscure words such as glade sna metropolis. There is, furthermore, a preference for more lorme Latinate synonyms in (age srhere there are also informal alternatives . for example, dismounted (rather than got off), removed (instead of tnok out). Gil) Interactional features Written texts. However, we must ask ourselven hoe many of these differ- eae ihe result ofa difference in median? How far weal it have made 8 difference if the conversation had been cared on writing by means of an online chat-room and the story had been made up and told orally to an discourse type in which these features are mou, strongly present is online chat-room discourse, where two or mote Participants are writing messages to each other on the computer screen in real time (Yates, 1996). So, it seems many sate of composition in ‘eal time’ (2) informality, which > feature of an! spoken discourse types; and (3) interactivity, which i also very com- ‘mon in speech, However, we should also note that there are some genuinely unique fea- ‘ures of spoken language which are not visible in che tanscribed extract. OF ee428 + ENGLISH WRITING: STYLE, GENRE AND PRACTICE sxeatest relevance t0 a comparison with writing are those that come under the general heading of prosody ~ stress, loudness, pauses, spllable dusarinn and intonation — and we will consider below how these atfect spoken versus Talika expression, [eis also important to emphasize that, although this par~ ticular transcript contains punctuation, the notion of punctuation beloves solely to written language, as we shall see in Section 23.2.3, 23.2 Medium 23.2.1 The primacy of speech or the primacy of writing? If you pick up an introductory book about language, itis quite likely that it Tr ake some reference to the ‘primacy of speech’. What linguists mean by this is that language was originally a purely spoken phenomenon, It mar anc for a long time after humans were able to speak that they started to wring things down (Wildgen, 2004), and even today, children learn to speak belee they leara to write. The upshot of this, itis claimed, is that, if we went os faderstand how language works, we should focus our attention om its spe, ken form, without importing any assumptions that are based on the wriveg medium, However, there are good grounds for questioning whether speech is any longer independent of writing and whether we should therefore now. adays talk about the ‘primacy of writing’? Becase most contemporary speakers of English are capable of reading and Waiting, and have undergone formal schooling in which these skills play a key part, itis arguable that we no longer think about language in purely spoken Kms, but that our notions of usage are suffused by concepts from writing, For example, if you ask almost anyone, they will say that language contain sentences. However, if you look at an unpunctuated transcript of spontan cous speech, it can sometimes be very difficult to identify where centence breaks should be placed. In fact, you may be surprised to know that there are occasionally no identifiable gaps of silence at all between ‘sentences’ in . specch (ef, O’Connell and Kowal, 2002: 94). The thing is that most people's notion of ‘sentence’ comes largely from written language, where seatences BS Lotites delineated by full stops (or by question or exclamation matks) Indeed, even early examples of writing (such as ancient Greek and Latin man scripts) may have little or no punctuation (ef, Finegan, 2001: 32-3), and this can sometimes make it difficult for a modern scholar to work ont the Sfammar of the text. In Old and Middle English texts also (roughly covering the period 700-1500}, there tended to be very litle punctuation, and what id appear was often unsystematic. The systematic punctuation of sentencen, broadly as it exists today, dates only from the seventeenth century (see, for example, Treip, 1970; Lennard, 1995; Robinson, 1998). Similarly, the problem of deciding what constitates a word in English is also very much grounded in writing (for a discussion of this, see Chapter 5, especially Table 5.2; also Katamba, 1994: ch, 2). For example, both English and German have a class of compound nouns. In German, the clements of the SopPound noun are always written together as a single word ~ for example, Balnkarto (where Babn = ‘rail’ and Karte = ‘card’; but, in English, there igSPEECH, WRITING AND DISCOURSE TYPE + 429 frequently a choice: we can choose to write rail card, rail-card, or rileard. j Pectsionally, however, we have to write something as two separate words, if for instance: riding boots. This raises the question: if we can have railed 2 | angle word, why can't we also have idingboots? In speech, the iseue hardly {i arises, because the pronunciation is the same, regardless of orthography; howe, Sachin Writing, it s a major issue, because present-day written usage i cod. | Tp ferms of ‘correctness’ ina way that isnot the case for spoken languses, | The whole question hinges on definitions that are grounded in writing, 23.2.2 Things that you can’t do in writing but you can do in speech The two key meaning-bearing elements that are present in speech but not in Writing are prosody (ie., stress, loudness, intonation, syllable duration, Pauses, etc.) and —at least as far as face-to-face communication is concerned j non-verbal communication or ‘body language’. Although these frequently do | not contribute hugely to the verbal message, there are nevertheless instances I Where they are crucial in acting as cucs forthe disambiguation of praymanc meaning or force. For instance, someone once wrote in an e-mail i| Do you think itis worth spending 60 pounds on this? (That's a genuine question — not a negative comment!!) Inspoken language, he would not have needed to include the sentence in brack- ts, because his intonation would have distinguished between an cannatel Reston (asking for information) and an evaluative comment (implying that the thing was not worth 60 pounds). In writing, however, theee clacy ce absent, and there is consequently a greater danger that an arabiguous specch act will be wrongly interpreted. To compensate, it is necessary to ue ahi, form of metapragmatic comment (cf. Thomas, 1995), Similar cases occur when someone wants to emphasize an element in a sen- tence (Quirk et al, 1985). Take, for example, the following. Sara didn't tread mud into she carpet. In ordinary writing, this looks like just a straightforward informative sen- fence about what Sara has (not) done. However, in specch, the same sentence structure could be used to imply that, although Sara had not trodden mud into the carpet, somebody else had done so. This effect is achieved by adding extra stress and a fall-ise intonation to the word Sara; but to get actoss the same message in writing, it would be necessary to change the sentence struc, ture to something like: Ttswasn't Sara who trod mud into the carpet. or to add extra information to make a contrast explicit: Sara didn't tread mud into the carpet: Lizzie did.$80 + ENGLISH WRITING: STYLE, GENRE AND PRACTICE An alternative strategy would be to use a different typeface for Sara (such as » bold italics or undevining), and we will consider thingy en next section, typeface; and what I shall call font shifts (pe, the cae bold, italics, capit” alization, etc.) Punctuation serves primarily as an aid tothe reader in distinguishing the Srammatical structure of the text and helping to ecole any ambiguities. ILLUSTRATION BOX 23.1 Creative punctuation Be flowing extracts are from a magazine advertisement for holidays in the Bahamas e529 erage 77°F al yeor round. No wonder people take to it To snorkel, cubs dive, sail, kayak or fish Alter soaking up the sun, there's nothing better than a ‘ong, relaxing bath. In the sea, Sel scuba dive, sal, kayak or fh and we must reconsdey an interpretation clearly, the ‘embark’ sense is also intended, Fae gcond extract, once we reach the fistful stop, we assume again Fate information package of the sentence is complons wre imagine going ack to our hotel to take a bath, But we then read of el ee incomplete Hameeng agent, fn the sea, which we must tack on to whér hee gone before immediate, our assumption is shatered and we aloe trains are to bathe inthe seaSPEECH, WRITING AND DISCOURSE TYPE » 431 it also enables a writer to do things which are possible in speech only by changing the wording or sentence structure (in a similar way to the speech-to-writing example above). For instance, the use of quote marks can have two main functions: (a) to mark something out as direct speech or a quotation without needing a speech act verb or other explicit marker (e.g., N said; according to N), and (b) in an attitudinal function, to distance oneself from a word or statement or to question its meaning, We could, for example, write This ‘improvement’ in conditions (questioning whether it was really an improvement), whilst in speech we would have to say something like This 30 called improvement in conditions. Quote marks are so useful for the latter purpose that the 1980s chat-show host Russell Harty took them over into his body language and often used his fingers to ‘draw’ quote marks in the air. ‘Typeface plays an important role in suggesting an overall ethos for a text. For example, German ‘Fraktur’-style printing on beer-bottle labels is used to emphasize the national origin of the beer. More generally, the so called serif typefaces (such as Times New Roman, which is offered as a default by most word-processing programs) suggest a traditional ethos, whilst sans serif typefaces (such as Arial, another common typeface in word-processing) are ‘more suggestive of modernity. (Figure 23.1 explains the difference between a serif and sans serif typeface.) Advertising, in particular, makes creative use of typefaces: advertisements that draw on themes from science, medicine and engineering will tend to use sans serif typefaces or typefaces which mimic a computer screen, whilst advertisements for luxury goods will often use secif typefaces and typefaces that imitate old-fashioned copperplate handwriting. Font shifts again can have multiple roles. Italics can, of course, be used for emphasis (another way round the problem discussed in Section 23.2.2) but also, for instance, to indicate that a word belongs properly to a language other than English - for example, ‘One of the features of fin-de-sidcle Paris was ..”. Word-initial capitals may be used to distinguish between general and specific uses of a word ~for example, the University versus a university. In the case of words which started out their life as acronyms, such as LASER (= Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), the point at which they began to be written more commonly in lower case can help linguists to determine when they changed from being thought of as acronyms and became accepted words in the language (ef. Katamba, 1994: 182) | This This This is an example of a serif typeface. This is a sans serif typeface. ‘The ‘serifs’ are the little embellishments at (‘Sans' is French for ‘without’.) | the ends of bars ~ for example at the bottom of Notice that the T consists of two the vertical bar of the T and on the left and right simple straight lines, without any embellishments of the horizontal bar of the T. (or'serifs). Serif and sans serif typefaces FIGURE 23.1432 ENGLISH WRITING: STYLE, GENRE AND PRACTICE ILLUSTRATION BOX 23,2 Cross-linguistic variation in written language Some European languages (such as French and German) have pecullaritis in writing practices that set them apart from English Capitalization wadays unless something is being written entirely in capital letters English Only uses capital letters at the beginnings of sentences and proper name. In rearman, however a capital leteris used at the beginning of every noun, regard. in sighteenth-century English texts, but it then quite rapidly dropped out of use, leaving us with the convention that we use today, Emphasis When we want to emphasize something in English, we normally write it in bold Giitalc ype. Failing that, we may underline itor write i entirely in capitals In Garman, however, at least until around the 1940s, it could be very dificult to tse these conventions, because a lot of things were printed in a special kind or [ypeface known as ‘Fraktur’. Instead, a space was often inserted between each letter of the word. For example. Der Borschlag oon Me ye + ist gut, Zils practice was also used In typewriting and persisted in print oven after fraktur was mostly abandoned. itis only comparatively recently that Garmen ‘as widely adopted the practice of using bold and italics, like English dose, Writing people's names Wranalsh, we do not normally give any special emphasis to people's names We begin them with capital letters, but that is it. However, n both German and French, there isa cultural tendency to give added emphasis to surnames in certain written texts, German traditionally used the spacing method referred fe above, but sometimes printed the whole name in capitals; French just uses pales The deeper reasons forgiving this emphasis to names are not entirely ‘lear, but they may be tled up with notions of politeness (cf. Myers, 1985), Indicating special discourse types Vachek (1288) has pointed out that newspapers in Germany use font shifts as a way of indicating cfferent discourse types. Whilst the main body of the news, Paper is printed in ordinary type, ‘ighter’ material is printed completely in ta ‘c.f clstinguish it from the more serious reporting and topical commentary.23.3 Discourse type We began this chapter by looking at two examples ~ one written and one spoken ~ and concluded that many of the differences between them had more to do with situational features such as formality and purpose than with the medium itself, Once we get onto considering factors such as these, we are no longer talking about variation according to medium but about variation according to discourse type. 23.3.1 Classifying texts: text-internal and text-external criteria Discourse type (sometimes also called register) is a generic term for system- atic variation between different kinds of texts, which avoids some of the com. Plexities introduced by other terms in the area of language variation (see also Section 23.3.2). One of the reasons that the terminology is so complex is that there are two ways of approaching variation according to discourse type: one by referring to features external to the text and one by referring to features internal to the text. A text-external approach draws on features such as the characteristics of the anticipated audience (e.g., age, social class, educational level, gender, otc.) the characteristics of the author, the nature of the relationship between the author and the audience (e-g,, formal or informal) the overall purpose of the text (e,, to inform, to instruct, to entertain), and so on. A textinternal approach examines which linguistic features predominate. For instance, are most sentences long and complex or short and simple? To what extent are nouns modified by adjectives? Which verb tenses ate used the most often? By comparing checklists of features such as these, itis pos- sible to group texts according to similarities in their use of language, without considering any text-external criteria. 233.2. Genre, text-type, style and sublanguage As we just noted, the terminology of discourse types is quite complicated, Another reason for this is that itis used inconsistently by different authors, pethaps more so than terminology in other areas of language study. The terms and definitions that I shall introduce here are based mainly on those Proposed by Fairclough (1992), but you shonld be aware in your reading that the same terms may be used to mean different things On the one hand, genre is a very common way of referring to a discourse type. We talk, for example, about the genre of the novel, or of the newspaper editorial, or of political speeches. More narrowly, however, genre is best used to describe a classification of texts where text-external criteria have a decisive role. Fairclough (1992: 126) defines it as ‘a relatively stable set of conventions that is associated with...a socially ratified type of activity’. So, when we talk about the newspaper editorial as 2 genze, we refer both to its conditions of production, distribution and consumption, and ta its characteristic linguistic features, The term text type, on the other hand, is normally reserved for a descrip- tion of discourse types based solely on text-internal features, without any reference to social practices, SPEECH, WRITING AND DISCOURSE TYPE « 433 | |434_¢ ENGLISH WRITING: STYLE, GENRE AND PRACTICE ILLUSTRATION BOX 23.3 (uasested checklist for discourse type analysis (adapted from Weise (1993) and Hoffmann (1991)) 1 WW 12 13 14 1s 16 2 24 22 23 3 31 32 41 42 43 4A 4s Situational criteria ‘Address (source, author(s, time of publication) Standard (e.g, American English, British English) Subject field (general area and special area) pate) Professionalism (e, whether addressed to experts or lay people) Medlum (titten v. spoken; special forms such as radio, TY, etc) Pegree of formality (formal v. informal; prepared v. spontaneovs) Interactional eriteria Garticipation (monologue, dialogue, polylogue (eg, a roundctable discussior)) Social roles (kind of interaction; differences in status between participants) Spatial and temporal contact (proximity v, distance) Pragmatic criteria fe eamunicative function (What is the overall function of the text? Qn $2 Stablish contact; to convey information; to exercise contro) She@ch act configuration (Which speech acts are used to comey the com- Where function of the text? Do they occur in particular sequences? Which predominate?) Semantic and syntactic criteria (acrostructure (What is the overall structural plan of the text?) egrence (ow are the elements of the text linked together? Repetition Sake words use of conjunctions linking adverbs (therfore so, thes thon Ceut etc delet determiners (this, thot, those, these); pronouns) Grammar (What sentence types predominate ~ statements, cuestions, Simple oe exclamations? Are sentences mostly short or long? Are they theit own or are they typically modified by adjectives or postmodifying DPhrases/clauses? Are adjectives typically modified by adverbs? Do route SET on their own or are they modified by adverbial? Are these adverb Tactile words or phrases/clauses? Are contracted verb forms uses?) Xocabulary (1s itformal or informal? Are specialized technical terme coed? Are they explained or is it assumed people know what they mean? What are the main semantic fields involved? How varled are the choices of wording within these semantic fields?) Grammatical categories (What voices/tenses/persons of the verb are sea Are nouns mostly proper or common; abstract or concrete; human,SPEECH, WRITING AND DISCOURSE TYPE + 435 ADVANCES BOX 23.1 Multidimensional analysis An important advance in the way that we classify texts according to textinter ‘al features has been enabled by the use of large computerreadable databonis of naturally occurring texts. We call these databanks corpora (singular: con, pus). When twinned with advanced statistical methods, corpora are ¢ powerful way of discovering or confirming fundamental patterns of variation between texts. Looking at both spoken and written texts Biber (1988) uncovered several dimensions of variation. The mast important of these is the dimension ‘infox Imational’ versus ‘interactive’, which incorporates many of the features ith, Srto often called ‘written’ vs, ‘spoken. Other dimensions include ‘narrative’ ve eer ear athe’ and ‘impersonal vs ‘non-impersonal. The basic idea's that any the fan be positioned somewhere on each of these dimensions by adding up ere frequencies of characteristic linguistic features. though the replcaslity Pee aa ans other than ‘informational-inteactive’ has been questioned (.9, by Lee, 2000), Biber’s work is important because it shifts the focus from cack, {ing texts in terms of a typology (so that a text elther belongs to type X of Goes not) to thinking of discourse type variation in terms of gradients (so that iy xt mare or less of X). This tes in well with ideas such as interdiscursity {Gee Section 23.3.3 in the main text), which questions whether there ae (r)any Pigs, 2scourse types. Similar work has been caried out by Nakamura (e.g, de athe has suggested that we can classify written texts mostly according {2.3.inale dimension ‘inforrative-imaginative’, and by Takahashi (2006), whe focused especially on spoken language and revealed the importance of the dimension ‘formal-informa A job interview is a good example for distinguishing between genre and Sext-tPe approaches. In approaching this discourse type from a genre pet- gusctive, we would make reference to features such as its purpose (getting a Job) its setting (commercia) the participants involved (applicant, manaren t=) its place in a larger pattern of social behaviour (the whole process of givertising and applying for a job), and 50 on. We might choose to group ib using these criteria, with functionally related discourse types such 45 job desctiptions, application letters, interview report forms, et. In approach, ing the job interview from a text-type perspective, however, we would fosus solely on linguistic features such as the lengths of turns, predominant speech act types and their sequences (e.g,, question followed by report), level af for, mality of vocabulary, pronouns (we would expect mostly fisst- and second. Person forms), verb tenses and so on, In this case, we would probably end up Srouping it with other conversations involving unequal roles, in so far as they Would tend to show a similar distribution of linguistic features ~ for instance, doctor-patient interactions and the exchanges between experts and member: of the public on the TV show The Antiques Roadshow. Related to discourse types is also the notion of style. Faisclough consid- ers style to be describable as a combination of three components: tenor {the