English Grammar in Conversation
English Grammar in Conversation
Geoffrey Leech
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY, LANCASTER LA1 4YT, UK
A thorough description of spoken English grammar is felt to be overdue. After all, spoken language has largely been neglected by grammatical tradition; the word grammar itself descends from the classical Greek word for writing. The grammarian 's bias towards the written language remains strong today, and is reflected in such terminology as 'left dislocation ' and 'right dislocation ' in referring to grammatical transformations. To understand these terms, we have to think of a sentence as immobile and visible on the page, like a laboratory specimen, rather than as an ongoing phenomenon of speech. Morever, discrimination in favour of the written sentence, in grammars, has to some extent been reinforced by the advent of computer corpora, simply because until very recently corpora of spoken language have not been available in sufficient quantity and coverage.
The opportunity now exists, however, for corpus linguistics to redress this balance, by taking advantage of the new availability, in the 1990s, of large and varied spoken
English corpora. These include notably the spoken component of the British National
Corpus, collected by Longman; the spoken component of the Bank of English corpus, collected by the Collins COBUILD team, and the CANCODE corpus, collected by
Cambridge University Press. (To say that these publishers 'collected ' these spoken corpora is convenient shorthand for saying that they organized, and paid for, their collection.) It is significant that all these large computer corpora of speech have been brought into existence by major British dictionary publishers: in fact, a fourth such publisher, Oxford University Press, was the lead partner of the whole British National
Corpus project.
The project on which I am about to report 1 was also sponsored by a publisher:
Addison Wesley
Geoffrey Leech
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY, LANCASTER LA1 4YT, UK
A thorough description of spoken English grammar is felt to be overdue. After all, spoken language has largely been neglected by grammatical tradition; the word grammar itself descends from the classical Greek word for writing. The grammarian 's bias towards the written language remains strong today, and is reflected in such terminology as 'left dislocation ' and 'right dislocation ' in referring to grammatical transformations. To understand these terms, we have to think of a sentence as immobile and visible on the page, like a laboratory specimen, rather than as an ongoing phenomenon of speech. Morever, discrimination in favour of the written sentence, in grammars, has to some extent been reinforced by the advent of computer corpora, simply because until very recently corpora of spoken language have not been available in sufficient quantity and coverage.
The opportunity now exists, however, for corpus linguistics to redress this balance, by taking advantage of the new availability, in the 1990s, of large and varied spoken
English corpora. These include notably the spoken component of the British National
Corpus, collected by Longman; the spoken component of the Bank of English corpus, collected by the Collins COBUILD team, and the CANCODE corpus, collected by
Cambridge University Press. (To say that these publishers 'collected ' these spoken corpora is convenient shorthand for saying that they organized, and paid for, their collection.) It is significant that all these large computer corpora of speech have been brought into existence by major British dictionary publishers: in fact, a fourth such publisher, Oxford University Press, was the lead partner of the whole British National
Corpus project.
The project on which I am about to report 1 was also sponsored by a publisher:
Addison Wesley
References: Brazil, D. (1995). A grammar of speech. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Carter, R. and M. McCarthy. (1995). Grammar and the spoken language. Applied Linguistics 16(2): 141-158. 10