The notion of standard spoken grammar

84 - The notion of standard spoken grammar

The term ‘standard grammar’ is most typically associated with written language, and is usually considered to be characteristic of the recurrent usage of adult, educated native speakers of a language. Standard grammar ideally reveals no particular regional bias. Thus ‘Standard British English’ grammar consists of items and forms that are found in the written usage of adult educated native speakers from Wales, Scotland and England and those Northern Irish users who consider themselves part of the British English speech community.

The typical sources of evidence for standard usage are literary texts, quality journalism, academic and professional writing, etc. Standard grammar is given the status of the official record of educated usage by being written down in grammar books and taught in schools and universities.

Spoken transcripts often have frequent occurrences of items and structures considered incorrect according to the norms of standard written English. However, many such forms are frequently and routinely used by adult, educated native speakers. Examples of such structures are split infinitives (e.g. We decided to immediately sell it), double negation (e.g. He won’t be late I don’t think, as compared to I don’t think he will be late), singular nouns after plural measurement expressions (e.g. He’s about six foot tall), the use of contracted forms such as gonna (going to), wanna (want to), and so on.

Standard spoken English grammar will therefore be different from standard written English grammar in many respects if we consider ‘standard’ to be a description of the recurrent spoken usage of adult native speakers. What may be considered ‘non-standard’ in writing may well be ‘standard’ in speech.

Speech and writing are not independent. Although some forms of spoken grammar do not appear in writing (unless in written dialogues), there is considerable overlap and there is an increasing range of forms appearing in informal written texts which previously were only considered acceptable in speech. In => 120 the presence of typically spoken grammatical forms in such contexts as emails and internet chat-room exchanges is discussed.