Grammar and the Spoken Language

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    Gramm ar and the Spoken Language

    1

    RONALD CAR TER and MICHAEL M cCARTHY

    Universityof Nottingham

    In this paper, we argue that language teaching which aims to foster speaking

    skills and natural spoken interaction should be based upon the gramm ar of

    spoken language, and not on grammars which mainly reflect written norms

    Using evidence from a mini-corpus of conversational English, w e look a t how

    four grammatical features which occur with noticeable frequency in the corpus

    are dealt with in currently popular pedagogical gramm ars Our investigation

    show s that treatmen t o f the selected features varies from adequate to patchy to

    complete absence from the gramm ars surveyed We conclude that research in

    discourse analysis does offer some helpful insights into the usage of these

    features, but that, in the absence o f easy access to discourse analysis work and

    given the mixed treatment in gramm ar books, teachers and learners will often

    be thrown back on their own resources How ever,

    we

    argue that even verysmall

    amoun ts of real spoken data can yield significant evidence which can be used

    imaginatively within inductive and language awareness approaches in and out

    of the classroom to increase awareness and knowledge of the gramm ar of

    conversation

    1 INTRODUCTION

    In the last couple of decades, the emphasis of English language teaching has

    shifted from a general notion of proficiency or com pete nc e tow ard s skills-based

    approaches, and the speaking skill has been foregrounded in a way that was not

    so som e twenty-five to thirty years ago In parallel, the com m unica tive ap pr oa ch

    has provided language teachers with innovative techniques and materials for

    fostering the spoken skills At the same time, language courses and works of

    reference are increasingly advertising themselves as offering 'real English

    1

    and

    'real-l ife communication' to the learner

    2

    Equally significant and relevant is the

    debate over model(s) of English selected for teaching the speaking skills,

    wh ether i t be south ern, m iddle-class B rit ish English, Am erican English, on e of

    the 'new E nglish

    1

    varieties, or else a m or e neu tral, culturally un attach ed variety

    of the language for intercultural communication that may not involve the use of

    English as a native or first language (see, for exam ple, Bex (199 3) on Eng lish in

    Eu rop e) But i t may be argued, as we shall argue in this pap er, that the m ode ls of

    grammar which underp in m ost of the laudable at tem pts at represen ting and

    activating the use of the spoken language are still rooted in descriptions of the

    grammar of writ ten English and have fai led to take on board some interest ing

    features of the grammar of informal, interactive talk Just as it would be

    questionable to base a writ ing skil ls course on grammatical statements based

    only on informal spoken data, in our opinion it is equally the case that spoken

    Applied

    Linguistics, Vol 16,No 2O Oxford University Press 1995

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    142 GRAM MAR AN DTHESPOKEN LANGUAG E

    language instruction based solely or mainly on written language description is

    an unsound methodological foundation upon which to build The problematic

    base from whichwelaunch our argument includes ideological confusion too so

    often, in our experience, attempts to discuss the grammar of speech in teacher-

    training seminars and similar contexts are clouded by prejudgements that many

    of the grammatical features observable in everyday, unplanned conversation

    are simply wrong

    1

    , and are corruptions of and lapses from the standards

    enshrined in the scholarly grammars (this may be particularly so in the

    perception of the public at large, see Pinker 1994)

    What we shall argue in this paper is that wntten-based grammars exclude

    features thai occur widely in the conversation of native speakers of English,

    across speakers of different ages, sexes, dialect g roups, and social classes, and

    with a frequency and distribution that simply cannot be dismissed as aberration

    If our speakers are 'wrong', then most of us spend a lot of our time being 'wrong'

    Such a view of grammar is absurd and needs to be put aside from the outset In

    this paper,weshall not make particular reference to course books, but suffice it

    to say that the available evidence points to a lack of fit between what conversa-

    tional data tell us and what textbook dialogues suggest, and not just for Bntish

    English(eg see Pica (1983) on Am erican English, O'ConnordiVito (1991) on

    French data and textbooks, and G lisan and D rescher (1993) on a similar lack of

    fit between real data and Spanish textbooks)

    Nowadays, computational analysis of large am ounts of natural language data

    is relatively easy, and pioneering projects such as COBUILD at the University

    of Birmingham have revolutionized the way we look at naturally-occurring

    language And yet even the COBUILD Grammar (Collins COBUILD 1990,

    hereafter CO B), along with other recent grammars, seems to underplay or omit

    recurring features of everyday spoken English In some cases, a lack of

    descriptive coverage may be due to a bias towards broadcast talk, where

    language

    is

    usually more measured, self-conscious, often pre-planned and more

    formal, and more likely to emulate written standards because of traditional

    perceptions of institutions such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

    (see the views of Summers (1994), representing rival publishers Longm an, on

    the question of bias towards broadcasting in relation to CO BUILD in theEFL

    Gazette article 'Corpuses', August 1994 18) In the case of the COBU ILD

    project, great stndes have been made in incorporating more and more spoken

    data of vanous kinds into its huge corpus, and others have not been slow to

    follow

    its

    lead

    m

    building major co rpora which are either devoted

    to ,

    or include,

    spoken material The Bntish National Corpus, now under development,

    promises scholars access to millions of words of spoken data (see Crowdy 1993

    for details) and its published products, it is to be hoped, will have the

    opportunity to reflect the nature of'r ea l' spoken language in a way that has not

    hitherto been possible In the meantime, though, language practitioners d o not

    have to sit back and wait for the results of such vast investigations for, with

    relatively small but carefully targeted corpora, much can be learnt about the

    spoken language, and small corpora can. in themselves, be directly exploited as

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    RONALD CARTER AND MICHAEL McCARTHY 143

    a valuable resource in teaching The fact thatlexis isessentiallya hugenumber of

    items whose occurrence, except for the most common words, is relatively

    infrequent means that convincing corpora for major lexicographical work need

    to be vast, perhaps tens of millions of words Gramm ar, on the other hand,

    consists of a small number of items and patterns frequently repeated, and thus

    much smaller corpora can yield regularly patterned data for grammatical

    analysis and exploitation in grammar teaching Put another way, even in a very

    large corpus of millions of words, many idiomatic lexical expressions will only

    occur once or a couple of times(e g Arnaud and Savignon (forthcoming) cite

    Rosamund Moon's evidence of only one occurrence of the expression it'sall in

    a day's work' in the 18-million-word Oxford Hector Pilot Corpus of British

    English) However, the inclusion of such instinctively useful expressions in

    dictionaries of idioms would pass largely without controversy On the other

    hand, even in a very small (by current standards) corpus of tens of thousands of

    words of conversation, one can easily find grammatical patterns not described

    in existing grammars occurring five, ten, or m ore times across different speakers

    and in different contexts Furtherm ore, huge corp ora often throw up vastly

    unmanageable numbers of occurrences of common grammatical features (e g

    the articles), resulting in compilers of dictionaries and gramm ars having to work

    with a sub-sample anyway And it should never be forgotten that even the very

    big corpora currently in use are themselves only small samples of the spoken

    and wntten output ofaspeech community over the course of many years Each

    average individual processes a phenomenal amount of language every day If we

    were only exposed to three hours of spoken language per day (many people

    experience this much and more from radio and television alone, not to mention

    their exposure to live conversation and to written language), the Nottingham

    corpus (see below) average figure of 100 hours for one million words of

    conversation would suggest that an individual might well process the 12 million

    spoken sample' words claimed by the Cobuild 'Bank of English' (see Fox,

    quoted in 'Corpuses',

    EFL

    Gazette August 1994 18)injust over a year of their

    adult life (many might achieve this in an even shorte r time) Naturally, small

    corpora cannot be the basis of sweeping generalizations about the spoken

    language, but they can be used as the basis of further research or day-to-day

    observations which can confirm or refute their limited evidence Above all,

    small corpora can be collected by teachers and learners and used as a class

    resource where existing published resources fail to supply data or descriptions

    of features of interest in the spoken language

    This paper bases

    its

    arguments on data taken from a mini-corpus of conversa-

    tional English which forms part of a larger spoken corpus currently under

    development at the University of Nottingham For the present purposes, we

    have taken 35 extracts of conversation averaging four minutes each,

    3

    giving us a

    total of approximately two-and-a-half hours of transcribed talk and 30,000

    words In this mini-corpus, 45 different speakers are represented, 22 males and

    23 females, ranging in age from 11 years to 78 years The speakers com e from

    across a broad social spectrum covenng unskilled working-class on one side to

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    144 GRAMMAR AND THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE

    professional people on the other They come from widely distributed areas of

    the British Isles The 35 extracts are classified by genre (see McCarthy and

    Carter 1994 24-38) We wish to concentrate principally on features of casual

    conversation as the core genre for any conversational analysis relevant to the

    teaching of general spoken English, with a secondary interest in narrative, and

    so the mmi-corpus is weighted accordingly, with other genres represented by

    smaller amounts of talk Fo r more reliable cross-generic com parisons, statistical

    normalization procedures such as that outlined by Biber (1988 75-8 ) can be

    brought into play, though in the first instance we are interested in gross

    frequency across all genres The classification and am ounts of data a re as

    follows

    A Casual conversation (bi- and multi-party informal talk with frequent turn-

    changes, no pre-set topics, equally distnbuted or shifting conversational roles),

    14 extracts, approximately 16,000 words, 35 of the total speakers represented

    B Narratives(stretches of talk amenable to narrative-structure analysis

    according to accepted models of narrative, for example Labov 1972) 11

    extracts, approximately6,000words, 15 of the total speakers represented

    C Service encounters (talk between server and served parties in shops,

    restaurants, etc, in the negotiation of goods and services), 5 extracts,

    approximately 4,000 words, 9 of the total speakers represented

    D Language-in-action (talk which accompanies some real-world task, for

    example, talk while preparing food, moving furniture, etc), 5 extracts,

    approximately 4,000 w ords,17of the total speakers represented

    The genre-classification is important, since the grammatical features we shall

    look at are not equally distnbuted across the genres, and we shall argue for a

    more genre-sensitive description of the spoken language as being the most

    useful resource for teachers and learners of English (see Biber, Conrad, and

    Reppen (1994) for a similar argument, though they refer to differences across

    registers, see also Rings (1992)) Our choice of the non-casual genres is

    influenced

    by

    our long expenence as English language teachers and the kinds of

    genres most often found in textbook dialogues It

    is,

    unsurpnsingly, notalwaysa

    simple, straightforward matter to assign extracts to genres For example,

    narratives often occur embedded in longer casual stretches, and defining what a

    minimal narrative may consist of is also occasionally problematic, but overall

    labelling is generally feasible and has a pedagogical usefulness that transcends

    any unresolved local difficulties

    Our purpose in analysing the data was to see how often features of grammar

    occurred which, intuitively in the first instance, could be labelled as unlikely to

    occur in formal, writtentext,but which, nonetheless,did not seem 'wrong' orlll-

    formed, but which occurred repeatedly in the mini-corpus We have been able

    to use large numbers of our own students and other seminar participants over

    the past year as informants to support our intuitions as to which features of the

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    RONALD CARTER AND MICHAEL McCARTHY 145

    texts corresponded to those criteria When at least five occurrences of any such

    features were recorded in the data, and provided the features in question

    occurred across different speakers independently of sex,

    age,

    dialect group, and

    social class, and across different extracts, searches were made in current

    descriptive and pedagogical reference grammars to see what coverage, if any,

    the features received

    4

    O ur interest was in forms and structures which, although

    unlikely to occur in the formal written mode, seem to pass as perfectly

    acceptable and grammatical in the informal spoken mode, and on which any

    observant language learner or teacher might well expect to find information in

    available published resources We did not count aborted structures o r

    anacolutha (changing from one structure to another in mid-stream, before the

    first construction is complete) Some work on spoken grammatical features to

    date (eg Brown 1980, Lewandowska-Tomaszcyk 1990) has concentrated on

    starkly obvious anomalies such as anacolutha and pronoun-copying in relative

    clauses(e g Th at's the record thatIlent it to her weeks ago') These features are

    undoubtedly of interest, since they are by no means isolated phenomena, but

    there are also other, less immediately striking features which do not seem so

    openly to violate traditional norms and yet which still slip through the net of

    grammatical descnption or are relegated to positions of minor importance in

    the descnptive and pedagogic apparatus, as we shall attempt to sh ow

    5

    In the following section, we shall take just four grammatical features, and

    report findings which we believe to be relevant for dealing with gram mar in the

    spoken m ode in the language teaching and learning context These features do

    not by any means exhaust our list of areas offering great potential for new and

    revised description and pedagogy, and more findings will be published as our

    project develops

    2 EVIDENCE FROM A SELECTION OF GRAMMA TICAL FEATURES

    2 1 Ellipsis

    Ellipsis, the omission of elements otherwise considered required in a struc ture,

    occurs widely in the mini-corpus Here we shall concen trate on just one kind of

    ellipsis, what Quirk

    et al

    (1985 895 ff) (hereafter QUIRK ) refer to as

    situational ellipsis

    Situational ellipsis differs fromtextualandstructuralellipsis

    in that the unrealized items of the conventional account of structure are

    retnevable from the imm ediate situation Textual ellipsis is characterized by

    retnevability from the text itself (either anaphoncally or cataphoncally), while

    structural ellipsis occurs when a purely structural element is omitted (eg 'I'm

    surprised [that] no-one told you ') Situational ellipsis is particularly apparen t in

    casual data Itisalso notably present in language-in-action data, where not only

    the participants but the objects and entities and processes talked about are

    typically prominent in the immediate environment There is also situational

    ellipsis in our service-encounter examples It is notably

    absent

    from the

    narrative data, where the participants and processes of the story are usually

    separated in time and place from the moment of telling

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    146 GRAMMAR AND THE SPOKEN LANGUAG E

    T h e r e a r e o v e r 8 0 p l a c e s i n t h e m i n i - c o r p u s w h e r e o n e o r m o r e i t e m s o f

    s t r u c t u r e w h i c h w o u l d b e e x p e c t e d in t h e f o r m a l w r i t t e n m o d e d o n o t a p p e a r ,

    b u t w h o s e r e f e r e n t s a r e r e t ri e v a b l e f r o m t h e i m m e d i a t e s i t u a t i o n O f t h e s e

    p l a c e s ,

    6 5 a r e e l l i p s e s w h e r e s u b je c t p r o n o u n s a r e r e t r i e v a b l e f r o m t h e

    c o n t e x t u a l e n v i r o n m e n t I n 4 1 o f t h e s e 6 5 c a s e s , a c o p u l a r o r a u x i li a r y v e r b is

    a l so ab se n t w h e re i t m ig h t b e ex p e c te d in w r i t t en tex t Ex t r ac t ( 1 ) , f r o m a

    lan g u ag e -m-ac t io n seg men t , g iv es th e ty p ica l f l av o u r o f th e se ty p es o f e l l i p se s

    (1) [mem bers of a family in their kitchen co okin g ne e in prep ara tion for a party)

    1 (0 1) Foreign body in there

    2 (0 2) It's the raisins

    3 (0 1 ) O h is it oh it's ne e with raisins is n

    4 (0 2) L No no no it 's not supp osed to be

    5 [laughs| erm

    6 (0 1) Th ere must be a raisin for u being in there

    7 (0 3) D'you want a biscuit

    8 (01) Erm

    9 (03) Biscuit

    10 (01) Eryeah

    11 |9secs]

    12 (0 3) All right

    13 (01) Yeah

    14 [10 sees)

    15 (0 3) Didn 't know you used boiling wa ter

    16 (02) Pardon

    17 (0 3) Didn 't know you used boiling wa ter

    18 (02 ) Do n't have to but its erm they reckon it s erm

    19 quicker

    Here we may o b se rv e e l l i p s i s o f t h e su b jec t an d v e rb p h ra se an d th e in d e f in i t e

    ar t ic le in l ine 1 , po ss i b ly e i th er there s a o r you ve got a fo re ig n b o d y in th e r e ,

    though these two interpretations by no mea ns exhaust the possibili ties ( e g / can

    see ais an equally possible cand idate for the und ers too d part of the message) In

    line 9, biscuit might minimally expect to attract a,while in lines 1 5, 1 7 , and 18,

    the pronouns / and

    you

    are not real ized These types of pron oun an d/o r

    pro nou n + o per ator absences are well de sen be d in existing gram ma rs (e g see

    Q UIR K ib id ), although the tende ncy is to explain them as elemen ts of

    informality Q U IR K simply states that sttuationa l ellipsis is 'restricted to

    familiar (generally spo ke n) Eng lish' (ibid 89 6 ) W hile it may be true that such

    ellipses do not occur in highly formal contexts, it is also true that the wholly

    informal and, by any account, ' familiar ' narratives in our mini-corpus do not

    have them either, and so the form ality/informa lity or familiarity d istinction is

    anything but the whole story We would arg ue that genre and context are the two

    key factors that m ediate beyond th e cho ice of formality/familiarity T he

    narrative genre, with i ts spatio-tem poral displacem ent, no m atter how informal

    or familiar, cannot easily retrieve its elements from the immediate context and

    thus spells out explicitly the participants and verbal operations which may be

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    RONALD CARTER AND MICHAEL McCARTHY 147

    assumed to be retr ievable from the environment in other, more si tuation-

    dependent forms of talk, such as tanguage-in-action, informal service encoun-

    ters, and casual talk, wh ere participa nts are face-to-face Ex tract (2 ), from a

    service encou nter, i l lustrates such retnevab ihty

    (2) [At a dry-cleaner's (02) is leaving a pair of trousers for cleaning|

    (01 ) Wednesday at four be okay

    (02) Er yeah that's fine just check the pockets a minute

    Initial willo r would from (Ol)'s turn and / ' / / from (02)'s second clause are not

    realized O ur conclusion is that a pr op er des criptio n of a feature such as

    situational ellipsis, and any de sc np tio n claiming pedagogical usefulness, should

    be able to state those en viron m ents in which the types of ellipsis desc ribed tend

    to and tend not to occur, as well as stating the structural restnctions on what

    elements in the clause may and may not be elhpted

    Even on the purely structural questions of what is permissible or not in

    situational ellipsis, existing gram m ars fail to tak e into accou nt som e interesting

    features of corre lation betw een gram m ar and lexis In the mini-co rpus , it is

    noticeable that, on many occasions, items are elhpted from what are often

    termed lexical phrases (Nattmger and DeCarnco 1992), inst i tut ionalized

    exp ressions (Lewis 1993 94 ), or fixed exp ression s (identified by the norm al

    criteria of lack of syntactic or lexical prod uctivity, see M cC arth y 199 2) Q U IR K

    (899) does permit this for the definite and indefinite article with fixed and

    idiomatic expressions, but our data show ellipsis of other items too in the

    environm ent of f ixed expressions Natt inger and D eC ar nc o (ibid ) argue that

    such expressio ns are fundam ental in the construc tion of text , and , indee d, i t is

    their very fixedness and cultural commonality which makes them good

    candidates for ellipsis, the unspoken elements of the message can always be

    assum ed to be know n Som e exam ples follow, with relevant fixed expres sions

    manifesting ellipsis in italic

    (3)

    (01) We did quite well out ofitactually

    (02) Great

    (03) Mm

    saved a fortune

    [ellipted

    we\

    (4 )

    (0 1) How many pillowsdo youhave,one two

    (02 ) I haveoneGraeme won't haveany

    (01) Yeah right okaygood job yousaid [elhpted it s/u was a\

    (5)

    (01) It'slovely

    (0 2) Go od winter wine that

    (01) Aterrificone

    (02) Put hairs on your chestthato ne[elhpted it ll]

    Fu rthe r, casual observa tion in the field suggests this feature is quite c om m on ,

    and future rese arc h w ill de vo te itself to investigating just ho w w ides prea d it is as

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    148 GRAMMAR AND THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE

    the corpus develops Once again, we would argue that any description of ellipsis

    in spoken language is incomplete which does not investigate fully and render an

    account of this essentially culturally embedded feature of lexico-grammatical

    form

    Ellipsis is a good starting point for our examination of grammatical features,

    for it is a feature which is described in existing published resources, but often

    with inadequate attention to precisely those features that leap out of natural

    spoken data Swan (1980) (hereafter SWAN

    6

    )givesvery good coverage of most

    of the types of situational ellipsis we find in our data but makes no reference to

    fixed expressions or to the uneven distribution over genres, prefernng formality

    as the determining factor and permitting elhpsis of words 'when the m eaning can

    be understood without them' (SWAN section 196, a similar quote may be

    found in the new edition, section 183) Alexander (1988) (hereafter ALE X) has

    no separate section devoted to ellipsis, textual ellipsis is referred to with

    examples as and when they arise On the kinds of everyday situational ellipsis we

    have referred to, ALEX is singularly unmformative COB (399 -4 00 )

    concentrates on the elliptical features of questions, short replies, and agreement

    sequences, and makes no reference to much of what we have observed in our

    data Downing and Locke's grammar (1992 242) (hereafter DOWL) has only

    an extremely short and cursory subsection on situational ellipsis, but at least

    recognizes the 'institutionalized

    1

    nature of ellipsis in many everyday expres-

    sions What we have, therefore, with regard to situational ellipsis in these major

    popular reference resourcesisan uneven and patchy treatment, even though the

    feature is extremely common in conversational data in the genres we have

    referred to

    Often in such cases it is worthwhile turning to discourse-analytical research

    papers and relevant books, and we shall argue for other features below that this

    is sometimes the best course of action for teachers and materials writers in

    pursuit of more accurate description In the case of ellipsis in conversation, the

    two most notable recent papers are Thomas (1987) and Ricento (1987)

    Thomas covers auxiliary contrasting (eg Hasshe arrived

    7

    ' - She

    should

    have

    by now'), and Ricento concentrates on clausal ellipsis which produces the kind

    of verbless short replies exemplified in COB No paper or book we know of

    covers adequately the kinds of features we have found to be frequent and

    significant in our data

    2 2 Leftdislocationandtopical information

    Left dislocation is one of the names commonly used for the phenomenon where

    items semantically co-referential with the subject or object of the clause are

    positioned before the subject An example from our data is

    (6)

    (01) Well

    Sharon,

    where I'm living,a

    riendof

    mine,she'sgot her railcard, and

    Here,

    a friend of mine

    is 'copied' in the subject pronoun

    she

    There are seven

    clear examples in the mini-corpus (uttered by seven different speakers in seven

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    RONALD CARTER AND MICHAEL MCCARTHY 149

    different extracts) wh ere the pro no un subject of the clause is co-referential with

    an init ial noun phrase uttered before the main clause gets under way, as in

    exam ple (6), and again here in examp le (7)

    (7)

    (01) The one chap in Covenl Garden whoIbought the fountain pen offhewas saying

    that he'd

    where he copies the who le of the preceding long nou n phra se Exa mp les (6)

    and (7) fit in with G eluyk ens' (19 92 ) m odel for left d islocation, w here

    a friend of

    mine in (6) would be term ed the ' referent ', shew ould be termed the

    'gap ,

    an d s

    got her railcard the 'proposi t ion' But other com parable ph enom ena, labelled

    'quasi-left disloc ation ' by G eluy ken s (ibid 131) are also ap pa re nt in ou r da ta,

    and m en t a closer look Fo r exam ple, the init ial noun phra se m ay be only

    indirectly related to the subject, which need not be a pronoun copy, as in (8)

    (8)

    (01) This

    riend

    of mine,her sonwas in hospital and he'd had a serious accident

    Or there may be discord of person and number between the front-placed noun

    ph rase an d the main -clause sub ject, as in (9), but which d oes not seem to

    hamper pragmatic decoding by the hstener(s)

    (9)

    (01) Thai couple thai we

    know

    in Portsmouth,Idon't hearof/ie r for months then

    Alternatively, the front-placed item may be gramm atically ind eterm inate an d its

    relationship w ith the main-clause subject only topically/pragm atically coh erent

    For instance, in (10) below, is the italicized portion a non-finite clause, or a

    noun-phrase (a colloquial version of 'your saying')

    9

    The precise grammatical

    status seems irresolvable, and yet its pragmatic link with the subject ( 'one of

    dad's many stones of how he escaped death during his long life ') is apparently

    clear to the participants and unproblematic

    (10)

    (01) You saying about that chap with the

    newspaper,

    that, one of dad's many stonesof

    how he escaped death [laughs] during his long life was

    Th e point ab ou t these canonical exa m ples of left dislocation an d th e less-clear

    but related examples is that they have in common the utilization of an available

    'slot ' before the core constituents of the clause (Subject, Verb, Object/

    Co m plem ent, Adjunc t, in wh atever ord er they occu r) are realized Ind eed , it

    would seem to be a m isno m er and a misleading metap hor to talk of dislocation,

    for i t suggests that something has been pushed out of place to a somewhat

    abe rrant posit ion This m etap ho r may be an unfo rtunate legacy of a Ch om sky an

    view of syntax

    7

    W e would arg ue that left-placed or fronted items of this kind are

    perfectly normal in conversational language, and are quite within their 'right

    place' The phenomenon occurs especially in the narrative genre, where ten of

    ou r total of fourteen exam ples of this type of feature occ ur It is ap pa ren t that

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    150 GRAMMAR AND THE SPOKEN LANG UAG E

    speakers use the available slot to flag a variety of items of information that will

    be helpful to the listener in identifying participants, in linking current topics to

    already mentioned ones, in reactivating old topics, and generally anchoring the

    discourse, offering what Quirk

    et al

    (1985) call 'a convenience to hearer'

    (QUIRK 1417) Thisisa quintessential example of'gram mar as choice', where

    the speaker chooses to fill an available slot for textual and interpersonal

    motives The grammatical indeterminacy of what may fill the available slot,

    which we shall term thetopic because of its proclivity to carry topic-prominent

    items,

    actually means that it is quite easy for language learners to manipulate

    and experienced teachers will here recognize a common feature of learner

    discourse manifested in examples such as 'My father, he has two brothers and

    one sister*, which are .sometimes lamented as examples of aberrant structure

    The problem may well be better pul down to lack of

    pragmatic

    motivation for

    using the structure rather than to any inherent ungram matically

    QUIRK handles the topicslot under a wider phenom enon termed

    reinforce-

    ment,which includes what

    we

    discuss below in section 23,and describes it as a

    feature of colloquial style used for 'purposes of emphasis, focus or thematic

    arrangement (QUIRK 1416) COB seems to ignore the phenomenon

    altogether, and no heading anywhere would seem to point the student in the

    direction ofthisfrequent feature of 'real' English (our claim toitsfrequency and

    normality is here doubly reinforced by Geluykens' (ibid) data from a much

    larger corpus) SWAN (1980 edition) offers no guidance in connection with the

    topic slot except for one isolated example sentence withatopic-slot object and a

    copied pronoun in the main clause, under the heading emphasis (section

    201 3 a) The new edition of SWAN improves on this with several examples of

    what Swan calls detached fronted subjects and objects' (section 217

    3),

    but with

    no guidance as to the function of fronting other than stating that it is common

    Wecan find no examples ofthetopic-slot phenom enon in AL EX and only the

    briefest of mentions in DOWL, which, using Halhdayan terminology, refers to

    'preposed themes' (234) Once again, the picture is inadequate and terribly

    patchy We would argue that ouP da ta , which points to genre-correlations,

    suggests that more detailed descriptions of this phenomenon are needed, and, in

    the case of narra tive, whichiswhere the majority of instances occur in our mini-

    corpus, the topic-slot needs to be related to basic narrative functions such as

    abstracts and orien tations, to use Labov's (1972) terms

    2 3

    Reinforcem ent the tail slot

    Just as there seems to be an available slot at the front of the clause, which we

    have called the

    topic,

    so too , when all the core clause constituents have been

    exhausted, is there a final available space which speakers often choose to fill

    with different types of information Tags occupy this slot A typical example is

    the reinforcement tag (eg'You're stupid,

    yo uare

    *),whichiswell-covered in the

    sources we have surveyed But also recurrent in the mini-corpus are amphfica-

    tory noun-phrases, the reverse, as it were, of the topic-slot noun phrase and a

    subsequent copying pronoun Some examples follow

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    152 GRAM MAR AN DT H ESPOKEN LANG UAG E

    Tab le 1 Structural potential of the clause in conversa tion

    Sequence

    Function

    Constituents

    Forms

    pre-clause

    TOPIC

    S-tp/O-tp/RI

    NP/NFC

    clause

    CORE

    S/V/O/C/A

    NP/VP/ADVP

    post-clause

    TAIL

    TAG/S-tl/O-tl

    NP/VP

    S-tp and O-tp ~ subjectorobjectin thetopic slot S-il and O-tl

    subject orobjectin

    the tail slot, RIrelated item (as in example (8) above),andTAGany of the types of

    English sentence-tags (see Bennett 1989) S/V/O/C/A represent the core clause

    constituents (subject, verb object complem ent, and adjunct), which may be re-ordered

    for avariety of thematic and focusing purposes (eg object-fronting, see Hietaranta

    1984) NP = noun phrase NFC = non-finite clause,as inexample(10)above,VP=

    verb phrase

    and

    ADVP

    =

    adverbial phrase

    2 4

    Indirect speech

    Indirect spee ch is an area which, on the face of it, seems th orou ghly cov ered in

    the gram ma rs we have surveyed H un dre ds of examp les abou nd of the type 'X

    said that Y\ where the reporting verb (typically sa yor tell)is in the simple past

    tense and the sequence of tense rules apply to the reported clause And yet in

    our mini-corpus, eleven examples of indirect speech (uttered by eight different

    speak ers in eight different extracts) have the repo rting v erb in past co ntin uo us

    Some examples follow

    (15)

    (01)

    1

    mean

    1

    was sayingto mum earlier that I'm actually thinking not for the money

    but for the sort of fun ofitreally trying to get a bar or a waitressing jobI

    wassaying

    to

    you wasn't 11(02) Yeah) in the summer well over Christmas or Easter

    (16)

    (01) Tony

    was saying

    they should have the heating on by about Wednesday

    17

    (01 ) Wh ere were, yeah because I was saying to Ken that you wouldn t be in a pub at

    twelve o clock in Corby would you you w ould have to be in som ebo dy's house

    (18)

    (01 ) Yes M aureen and Derek were tellingme you have to get a taxi

    Ex am ple (1 8) abo ve, it will be note d, has tellin past con tinuo us In add ition to

    the eleven examples in the mini-corpus, we have collected a further eleven

    instances of indirect reports with past continuous

    sa y

    o r

    tell

    by eleven different

    speakers on separate occasions during casual listening over the last three

    mo nths, thus revealing the value of a m ini-corp us as a stimulus for further tar-

    geted observation in the field None of the illustrative sentences in any of the

    gram ma r bo ok s surveyed co ntain a single exam ple of this feature All exam ples

    are with

    sa y

    a nd

    tell

    (and oth er rep ortin g verbs) in simple past tense Th e same is

    true of researc h articles on indirect speech M ost pap ers are co nc ern ed w ith the

    problem of backshift in the sequ encin g of tenses (e g prese nt be co m es past)

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    RONALD CARTER AND MICHAEL McCARTHY 153

    when direct speech becomes indirect, for example, Coulmas (1985), Comne

    (1986), Goodell (1987), Huddleston (1989), Harman (199 0) A good surveyof

    debates among linguists concerning direct and indirect speech may be found in

    Baynham (1991) Yet despite the shift Baynham notes towards looking at

    speech reporting within discourse pragmatics, even those investigations using

    real data fail to pick up on the use of past continuous in indirect speech

    reporting verbs, for example, Philips (1985), Tannen (1986), Wald (1987)

    Notable tooisYule # a /' s (1992) paper, which sets out to take to task previous

    work on speech reporting and which shows with real spoken and written data a

    wide range ofwaysof reporting speech, butwhich,none the less, fails to note the

    past continuous phenom enon for indirect speech Perhaps even more

    remarkable is the absence of any reference to past continuous with

    say

    and

    tell

    in the recent CO BU ILDReportingG uide (Thompson 1994), which is corpus-

    based with hundreds of real examples of indirect speech, and which is

    thoroughly detailed in every other respect

    The language teacher and the interested and observant learner are thus

    thrown back on their own intuition in understanding examples (15) to (18) We

    note that

    say

    and, in example (18),

    tell

    may be used in this way, that the report

    may be of what the speaker him /herself said or what another said, and that past

    simple could have been used, but with

    a

    distinctly different force the past simple

    seems to give more authority to the actual words uttered, while the past

    continuous seems more to report the

    event

    of the uttenng (exploiting perhaps

    the basic foregrounding and backgrounding functions of past simple and past

    continuous, respectively) Once again, though, what is interesting is that no

    examples of indirect speech in thenarrative extracts have past continuous We

    checked ten other narrative extracts not in the mini-corpus and none of them

    have any occurrences either All our examples occur in the casual genre, except

    one,

    which crops up in the middle of a language-in-action sequence All the

    indirect speech reports in our narratives are introduced by reporting verbs in

    past simple or so-called historical present (see Johnstone 1987 on this) This

    may hint at a truly reporting function for past simple reporting verbs, where

    what someone said

    and

    what words they used (although creatively recon-

    structed) are considered important On the other hand, past continuoussayand

    tell

    show a tendency to emphasize message content rather than form, and to

    report or summarize whole conversational episodes rather than individual

    utterances At the moment, our conclusions must be tentative until much more

    data can be analysed As a feature of spoken English gramm ar, it seems, past

    continuous reporting verbs have slipped through the grammarians' net We

    would argue that this is precisely because (a) most notions of reported speech

    are taken from wntten data (including literary text), and (b) that where spoken

    data have been consulted, there has been an over-emphasis on oral narrative,

    which is simply unlikely to yield such exam ples if the present corpus is anything

    to go

    by,

    and an over-emphasis on b roadcast talk, where indirect speechislikely

    to be of a truly quotational type, where form and content are both important

    (e g news reporting)

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    154 GRAMMAR AND THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE

    3 CONCLUSIONS IN I HE PEDAGOGICAL CONTEXT

    The last points in section 24 concerning indirect speech underscore some

    central pedagogical considerations with regard

    to

    spoken English grammar

    Principally,wewould argue that descriptions that rest on the written m ode or on

    restricted genres

    and

    registers

    of

    spoken language

    are

    likely

    to

    omit many

    common featuresofeveryday informal grammar and usage,or atbest relegate

    themtomarginal placesinthe description, regardlessofcorpus size But other

    considerations arise too, which we summanze as follows

    1 There is

    no

    common, agreed metalanguage

    for

    talking about

    the

    features of

    spoken grammar that we have focusedon in this article Our surveysofcurrent

    grammars reveal

    a

    bewildering and often user-unfriendly variety

    of

    terms used

    to descnbe

    the

    features illustrated This makes

    it

    difficult

    to

    find

    and

    compare

    information, even where it exists

    2 Research-minded teachers and learners canget a lot of information on

    spoken grammar from articles and books within the areaofdiscourse analysis,

    but these sources are sometimes obscure and difficult of access

    3 Real spoken data is hard to come by

    for

    many teachers and learners, and

    the

    concocted dialoguesofcourse books often suffer from grammatical artificiality

    and

    do not

    feature

    the

    kinds of grammatical items we have looked

    at

    Without

    either improved descriptions

    ofthe

    spoken grammar

    or

    materials which reflect

    it, grammar teaching within the communicative approach will alwaysbeout of

    kilter with the typical kindsofinformal interaction teachers hope to foster and

    which learners frequently hopetobe able to enter into in a natural way

    4 Even very small corpora,ifproperly targetedandapproached with an open

    mindandcareful observation, can yield recurring patterns of grammar thatare

    not fully (or not at all in some

    cases)

    described

    in

    conventional grammars Size is

    no guarantee that the corpus will yield up its secrets

    if

    it isbadly targeted

    or

    not

    subject to detailed searching (see Owen (1993) forarelevant critique of corpus-

    based grammar) But even small corpora may bedifficult tocollect inmany

    situations, and publishers should be encouraged to publish user-friendly

    corpora

    and

    more real spoken language extracts

    as

    resources

    for

    teachers

    and

    learners

    5 Corpora should

    be

    carefully chosen

    to

    reflect

    the

    model

    of

    English

    the

    learners maywantor need toacquire There is little point inagonizing over

    interactive features of informal spoken British English grammar if such features

    simply do not occur in the target vanety This agument goes alongside our view

    that there is equally little point in basing grammar teaching exclusivelyon

    written models

    if

    the goal is to encourage speaking skills

    6 Inthe present situation, the best course of action would seem to betoexpose

    learners

    to

    natural spoken data wherever possible and

    to

    help them to become

    observersofthe grammaroftalkinits natural contextsandin different genres.

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    RONALD CARTER AND MICHAEL McCARTHY

    ]

    55

    as advocated by Riggenbach (1990) Ellis

    8

    has claimed that learners need to

    learn how to observe language through tasks which foster comprehension as

    much as production, and an over-emphasis on production in grammar may not

    necessarily be the best approach in relation to the features we have described

    7 The kinds of features we have looked at may not be entirely suitable for the

    traditional 'three Ps' (Presentation-Practice-Production) mode of teaching,

    and approaches based on observation, awareness, and induction may prove to

    be a more satisfactory way of dealing with the interpersonal subtleties of choice

    in matters such

    as

    ellipsis and topicahzing Our mnemonic would be the three

    Is*

    (Illustration-Interaction-Induction) where illustration stands for looking at

    real datawhich may be the only option since the grammar books and current

    materials so often fall short, interaction stands for discussion, sharing of

    opinions and observations, and induction stands for making one's own, or the

    learning group's, rule for a particular feature, a rule which will be refined and

    honed as more and more data is encountered On this last point, the patchy,

    confusing, and often inadequate treatment of the grammar of spoken language

    in published resources may turn out to be a cue for imaginative discovery and

    problem-solving work in the grammar class One only needs an initial cunosity,

    some real data, and the feeling that there is a lot to be discovered to get started

    (Revised version received August 1994)

    This paperwasreviewed and accepted by the previous editorial team, before the

    appointment of Michael McCarthyasjoint editor ofApplied

    Linguistics

    NOTES

    1

    This articleisa version ofapaper delivered by the authors at the Second MATSDA

    Conference at the University of Luton, UK in January 1994, and at TESO L, Baltimore,

    USA, in March 1994 Further versions were presented at TESO L Greece, Athens

    March 1994, IATEFL Argentina, Buenos

    Aires,

    July

    1994,

    and BRAZTESOL, Riberao

    Preto, Brazil, July 1994 The authors are grateful for the many comments offered by

    participants at those conferences which have helped to shape and refine the present

    article

    2

    'Helping learners with real English' is the slogan used to promote the Collins

    COBUILD reference books and materials Real-life communication' has been used

    recently in publicity literature lo promote the Look Aheadmulti-level English course,

    published by Longman of Harlow, UK

    3

    There is a difficulty in controlling length of extract in that narratives and service

    encounters are closed episodes of unpredictable length, and many of these extracts are

    shorter than four minutes, while the open-endedness of casual conversation means that

    episodes can be considerably longer before participants negotiate some sort of break or

    closure

    4

    The figure of five occurrences is based on a projected average of once per5,000

    words of conversation,

    5,000

    words representing approximately 24-25 minutes of talk

    Some canonical features (eg adding-clauses with

    which

    and w/t-clefts) occur withthis

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    156 GRAMMAR AND THE SPOKEN LANG UAG E

    frequency in the mini-corpus and so the figure is claimed to have sufficient reliability for

    our present purpose

    5

    While we con cen trate here on what we call

    spoken

    gramm atical features, we are

    aware that so me of the features we have ch ose n to highlight {e g situationa l ellipsis) may

    also occur in certain types of written text, for instance friendly and informal letters,

    postcards, diaries, e-mail messages, etc, as well as written advertising and literary texts

    which purposely evoke conversational style (see McCarthy 1993 for examples) The

    existence of such texts underlines the difficulty of creating a sharp boundary between

    spoken' and 'written

    1

    gramm ars and the need for comprehen sive descript ions covering

    the full range of genres and contextual types, which traditional grammars have usually

    failed to provide

    A

    A new edition of this work is in pres s and is due in late 1994 W e are very grateful to

    Michael Swan for letting us read pr oof s of the new editio n W he re two section refe renc es

    are given they refer to the 1980 edition an d the new edition in that o rd er

    7

    We are grateful to Robin Fawcett of the University of Wales, Cardiff College, for

    offering us this view of the provenance of the dislocation metaphor

    * Rod Ellis, M A T S D A co nference talk. University of Luton , UK, Janua ry

    1

    1994

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