Spoken and written language

1
Spoken and written language

• Baseado em Eggins(2004) e Halliday(1989)

2

• spoken

• written

• interactive
• 2 or participants
• face to face
• In the same place at the same time
• Language accompanies a task
• Language as action
• spontaneous
• No rehearsal of what will be said

• Non-interactive
• 1 participant
• Not face to face
• On her own
• Language to reflect
• Language not as action
• Not spontaneous
• can be but much less than speaking.write
  without planning
• Planning, drafting, rewriting

3

• spoken

• written

• casual
• Informal and everyday

• Not casual
• Formal and special occasions
• not all written texts are formal.
• Ex personal exchanges through emails.
• A note

4

• Spoken

• written

• Turn-taking organization
• Context-dependent
• Dynamic structure

• Monologic organization
• Context independent
• not totally because context is needed for text
  understanding but at the same time the written
  language has to overcome context to guarantee
  text comprehensibility across time and space.
• Synoptic structure

5

• written

• spoken

• -interactive staging
• -open-ended
• Spontaneity phenomena
• (false starts, hesitations, interruptions,
  overlap, incomplete clauses)
• Everyday words
• Lexically sparse
• (more use of verbs than nouns)

• - rhetorical staging
• - closed, finite
• Final draft (polished)
• Indications of earlier drafts removed
• prestige words
• depending on the genre
• Lexically dense
• (more use of nouns than verbs)

6
Halliday(1989)

• One has to think of written and spoken language
  in terms of three interrelated aspects the
  nature of the medium, the functions served, and
  the formal properties displayed let us say
  function, medium, and form. The three go
  together. So the spoken medium, in which text is
  a process (and becomes a product only by
  translation being written down), displays
  certain properties of organisation, and is
  appropriate to certain functions.

7
Cont.

• It tends to be disvalued in written cultures
  because it is not the primary means of access to
  power and privilege. But before writing ever
  existed the spoken language was the vehicle of
  poetry, oratory, and the sacred and even in our
  own culture it has not entirely lost its
  rhetorical value. At the very least we appreciate
  a good conversationalist. (p.78-79)

8
References

• Eggins, S. (2004). An Introduction to Systemic
  Functional Linguistics. London Continuum.
• Halliday, M.A.K. (1989). Spoken and Written
  Language. Oxford. Oxford University Press.