9
shifts:
smooth - speaker B lets speaker A finish before taking the turn
and vice versa
unsmooth - speaker B does not let speaker A finish
cut-off - speaker A stops short when B starts to speak and vice
versa
(Stenstörm 1 - 4)
Speaker turns include various types of hesitation phenomena (silent
and filled pauses), verbal fillers (well, I mean, sort of), false starts, repetition,
incomplete utterances. Therefore, grammar is often fairly intricate, while the
vocabulary, especially in everyday conversation, tends to be very general (Stenstörm
2).
Speakers cooperate on three levels: interaction, discourse organization
and communication (Stenstörm 18). According to H. Paul Grice's cooperative
principle, there is a certain level of cooperation among communicants:
"Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected
remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some
degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some
extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted
direction."
(qtd. in Meyer 55)
Grice introduced four maxims to describe how speakers cooperate:
Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. If a maxim is violated, conversational
implicature results, which means that "the utterance receives an interpretation that
goes beyond the words that are spoke" (Meyer 56).
Table 1 contains Grice's four
maxims and their brief descriptions.
A. B. Stenstörm also suggests following principle of relevance in
order to minimaze reason for misunderstanding: "An utterance is relevant if it fits the
actual topical framework by adding something extra to the context and if it shows the
speaker's intention" (19).
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Maxim
Summary
Quantity
Do not say too much, do not say too little.
Quality
Be truthful.
Relation
Stay on topic, do not digress.
Manner
Make sure what you say is clear and
unambiguous.
Table 1: Maxims of the cooperative principle
(Meyer 56)
2.2 Differences between spoken and written language
"Spontaneous spoken language is very different in form and function from written
language."
(Brown 271)
There are many differences between spoken and written language; in
their form as well as in their function. I would like to start with linguistic features of
both varieties. The list of linguistic features is contained in Table 2 and these features
are henceforth discussed in this sub-chapter.
One of the differences between spoken and written variety is the way
how the language is organized and divided into segments. While in written language
this is done by using paragraphs and punctuation, in spoken language is the same
achieved by intonation, whose basic unit is called the tone unit. The tone unit
contains one nucleus
2
and usually is identical with an information unit.
There are several intonation patterns; each of them is typical for
different function and meaning of language structures. A falling tone is used at the
end of statements and expresses certainty, completeness and independence. On the
other hand, a rising tone expresses uncertainty, incompleteness or dependence;
typically it is used in yes-no questions, declarative questions and structures with
2 the focal point of an intonation pattern (Dontcheva-Navratilova 68)
11
subsidiary or parenthetical information (denials, commands, invitations etc.) The
rising tone sounds more polite than the falling tone which is rather direct. The third
intonation pattern is fall-rise which is used to indicate new topic, contrast or irony
(Dontcheva-Navratilova 68).
Typical speech
Typical writing
Prosody
Punctuation
Normal non-fluency
Fluency
Clause complexes/structures
Sentences and paragraphs
Simpler structures
More complex structures
Lexical sparity
Lexical density
Inexplicitness
Explicitness
Repetitiveness
Non-repetitivness
Informality features
Formality features
Monitoring features
No monitoring features
Interaction features
No interaction features
Table 2: Linguistic features of speech and writing
(Dontcheva-Navratilova 67)
Unlike written language, spoken interaction is limited by time. Thus
one of the problems which speakers face is pressure of time. A speaker should not
talk too long, otherwise he could be considered boring. On the other hand, he has to
say whatever he wants before his partner breaks in (Brown 272). On the contrary,
written language is permanent and therefore does not impose time contraints on
writers and readers. The writer has enough time to plan and revise his text, the reader
has a chance to re-read the written text as many times as he needs (Dontcheva-
Navratilova 66). As a consequence, when we speak we use simpler grammatical
structures because there is not enough time to create more difficult ones (Dontcheva-
Navratilova 69).
Spoken language also tends to be more repetitive and full of channel
holders and interactive control markers (Brown 275). Further, spoken language is
characterized by lexical sparity, which means that there is usually a very high