Speech No Less Structured Than Writing

It is a well known fact nowadays that spoken language is the primordial means through which social world is structured and transacted, the identities of its participants are affirmed or denied and its cultures are transmitted, renewed and modified.

What properties of spoken language allow it to act like that? In the previous unit we dwell in some detail on writing and written texts. It is time to return to the spoken language, and to ask: what does the spoken language do instead? Is it merely characterised by the absence of certain features that are found in writing, or has it got particular characteristics of its own?

There is a tradition of regarding spoken language as formless and featureless. Thus for example:

Spontaneous speech is unlike written text. It contains many mistakes, sentences are usually brief and indeed the whole fabric of verbal expression is riddled with hesitations and silences. To take a very simple example: in a seminar which was recorded, an articulate (and well-known) linguist was attempting to say the following:

I don’t think it is (200) if one (267) if one sorts out which are counterexamples

Here, the brief silences (unfilled pauses) have been measured in milliseconds and marked (these are the numbers in brackets) and all other types of hesitation or disfluency– false starts, repetitions, filled pauses and parenthetic remarks are underlined. It is these hesitations or disfluencies (both filled and unfilled) which dominate spontaneous speech and give it its distinctive structure and feeling [1, p.33].

All this amounts to is that in speech you cannot destroy the earlier drafts. If we had access to the original manuscript or typescript of the above quotation’s author and published that with all the crossingsout, misspellings, redraftings, and periods of silent thought measured in thirtieths of a second, we could say ‘But what he actually wrote was …’

Did you notice how formless, tentative and spur-of-the-moment the sample of speech... was? Yet, although it looks shabby in printed form, the original conversation would have seemed quite sensible to the participants (try reading it aloud). Why? Because speech is, by its nature, usually unstructured, superficial and low in content [4, p. 4, 5].

In this case the accompanying discussion is more helpful; but there are still some mistakes along the way. The sample of speech was tentative and spur-of-the-moment; but it was not formless. Speech is, by its nature. ‘Low in content’ –in the special sense of lexical density as described in Chapter 7 above; but it is not ‘low in content’ in the general sense of lacking information; and it is certainly not unstructured and superficial.

The ‘formlessness’ of speech is an artefact of the transcription; if a written text is reproduced with all the planning processes left in, then it too will appear formless. But even the most sympathetic transcription will not make spoken language look good in writing, for an obvious reason: it wasn’t meant to be written down. In the same way, most written English does not sound too good in speech: try reading the following out loud as if it was conversation.

THE DICTIONARY OF WORLD LITERATURE: CRITICISM – FORMS – TECHNIQUE presents a consideration of critics and criticism, of literary schools, movements, forms, and techniques – including drama and the theatre in eastern and western lands from the earliest times: of literary and critical terms and ideas: with other material that may provide background of understanding to all who, as creator, critic, or receptor, approach a literary or theatrical work. All the material here included has been written especially for this volume. Every item is the product of planning, consultation, and consideration both before and after writing. As far as possible, especially in the longer articles, the style of every contributor has been respected. With some of the factual items principally (as in the classical field) the editor has had to use a freer hand, where a topic was covered for various periods by different scholars, or presented in detail beyond the proportioned capacity of this volume. The several problems of cuts and interlinkings have been met with the work as a whole in mind, in the effort to combine accuracy and adequacy of presentation with due proportion and scope. Bibliographies indicate further avenues of inquiry.

The listing of the contributors’ names is no measure of their service. (In one or two discussions of current topics, the editor has inserted reference to the authors, who had modestly withheld such mention.) Many have been helpful, beyond any indication of their initials, in the organization of the material as well as in its final shaping. Suggestions have come most generously from Fernand Baldensperger: G.A. Borgese; A.K. Coomaraswamy; Marian Harman; Urban T. Holmes, Jr.; William S. Knickerbocker; Manuel Komroff; J. Craig La Driere; Eliseo Vivas. Allardyce Nicoll has been richly responsive with material concerning the theatre. In addition to contributing therein, William A. Oldfather has supervised the wide range of the classics. Walter A. Reichart has organized and edited the Germanic field.

(From Preface to Dictionary of World Literature: Criticism, Forms, Technique ed. J. T. Shipley, Routledge, London 1945, p.v)

Representing one through the lens of the other is rather like judging a painting by whether or not it makes a good photograph.

One has to think of both written and spoken language in terms of three interrelated aspects: the nature of the medium, the functions served, and the formal properties displayed – let us say function, medium, and form:

The three go together. So the spoken medium, in which text is a process (and becomes a product only by translation – being ‘written down’), displays certain properties of organization, and is appropriate to certain functions. It can be produced very quickly, make rapid adjustments in the light of the changing context, and express subtle nuances of interpersonal meaning. It tends to be disvalued in written cultures because it is not the primary means of access to power and privilege. But before writing ever existed the spoken language was the vehicle of poetry, oratory, and the sacred; and even in our own culture it has not entirely lost its rhetorical value. At the very least we appreciate a good conversationalist.

The spoken language is, in fact, no less structured and highly organised than the written. Itcould not be otherwise, since both are manifestations of the same system.

Spoken English and written English are both kinds of English, and the greater part of their patterning is exactly the same. But just as we were able to identify a feature that is particularly found in written English, that of high lexical density, so we can point out a related property that is especially characteristic of the spoken language – one that is not simply the absence of the feature already described.

Spoken English has, in fact, its own kind of complexity, arising out of the nature of the medium. In order to investigate this we shall have to make one further exploration into English grammar, up to the rank of what we are calling the clause complex. This is what lies behind the sentence as a written unit; but it does not depend on the written language, and is well developed in the speech of children a long time before they can read or write. The clause complex plays an important part in the processes of oral communication.

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