Grammatical acceptability

85 - Grammatical acceptability

In Cambridge Grammar of English book the following criteria* are adopted for grammatical acceptability in British English to determine whether or not an item or structure is included. ‘Widespread’ here means across speakers of both genders and across a wide range of ages and social and regional backgrounds.

•  Included: in widespread use in both the written and spoken corpus (most forms are in this category).

• Included: in widespread use in both the written and spoken corpus but not approved in more prescriptive grammar books and often avoided by many writers of formal English, for example, split infinitives, stranded prepositions (e.g. That’s the woman I gave it to, compared with That’s the woman to whom I gave it).

•  Included: rare or not occurring in the written corpus but widespread and normal in the spoken corpus ( for example, 96 Headers and 97 Tails), and vice versa.

•  Not included: regionally or socially marked in the written and/or spoken corpus but widespread and normal within major regional/social varieties of British English ( for example, the use of ain’t, 119b).

•  Not included: non-occurring and unacceptable in all varieties of British English he did must speak).

* Our thanks to Susan Hunston for suggesting this list of categories.

FROM UTTERANCE TO DISCOURSE

FROM UTTERANCE TO DISCOURSE          

92 – INTRODUCTION

Sections 82–91 outlined some key features of spoken language, especially the way face-to-face conversations are tied to the participants and the immediate situation in which they are speaking in real time.

In this chapter, 92–103, we consider how grammatical features in spoken utterances reflect the creation of discourse rather than just the internal construction of phrases, clauses and sentences. We use the term ‘utterance’ to refer to complete communicative units, which may consist of single words, phrases, clauses and clause combinations spoken in context, in contrast to the term ‘sentence’, which we reserve for units consisting of at least one main clause and any accompanying subordinate clauses, and marked by punctuation (capital letters and full stops) in writing.

This chapter considers how speakers orient themselves to the situation of speaking, centred on the notion of deixis. Deixis concerns the way speakers refer to people and things in terms of time and space, all in relation to the moment and situation of speaking. For example, the basic meanings of I and you in English are ‘person speaking’ and ‘person addressed’, respectively, and who the words refer to will change every time the speaker changes. Similarly, an object which is this cup for a speaker may be referred to as that cup by a listener who is separated from the speaker in space or time:

A:   What’s this box here?

B:   I don’t know. Trash.

[at a travel agent’s; the customer (A) has just received his tickets]

A:   Right well this is all right now is it?

B:   That’s the ticket yes.

(what is this for the customer is that for the agent)

=>  93

This chapter also considers how speakers encode assumptions about what can be understood from the situation without being said, and what cannot, as reflected in the phenomenon of situational ellipsis. Ellipsis, or absence of references to entities which are obvious to all participants, is common in informal speech:

A:   Finished yet?

B:   Not yet.

(obvious to the listener that the speaker means ‘Have you finished yet?’)           

=> 94

This chapter also examines how listeners respond to messages and show their ‘listenership’, for example by the use of response tokens, i.e. single words and phrases that represent much more personally and affectively engaged alternatives to bare yes and no:[talking about food preparation]

A:   Actually these things should be marinated the night before.

B:   Exactly. Oh absolutely. Actually er yeah. Even the vegetables, Karen.

The chapter then describes how speakers package the information in their messages with the listener firmly in mind (e.g. by the use of headers, informative items that precede the conventional clause structure and make the clause easier to process):

(header)

My father, he’s been in hospital three times already.

 => 96

In addition, the chapter considers how speakers create interactive exchanges by the use of questions and tags (short structures typically found at the end of clauses, such as You like mushrooms, don’t you?) (=> 98).

Another important feature of spoken discourse is the purposive use of vague language (such as sort of, whatever) to project particular kinds of relationships between speakers (=> 103).

The way speakers organise their utterances into coherent discourse and monitor it in relation to its reception by listeners is covered in the next chapter, in the section on discourse markers (=> 108).

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.