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One of the tasks of colloquial research is to make a catalogue of the examples of conversational speech, taking them to some sets of models.
We may speak about following syntactical processes characteristic for colloquial speech:
- Parcellation. Such construction is the consequence of utterances, shaped intonationally and in written form as separate sentences. The first utterance is a grammatically completed sentence, and following utterances (they are called parcelates) are added to the base-sentence as if they were its secondary parts.
Jack went off. To Paris. Yesterday. To fix things up. (Ср. рус. Она вышвырнула все книги. До одной. В помойку. Как будто бы они были в чём-то виноваты).
- Absolute attribute. Under absolute attribute one understand the name or nominal phrase in post-position to the main utterance and semantically representing the feature of one of its members:
Here comes Harry, a nice-looking guy. (Ср.рус. И вот наступила весна, тёплая, бурная).
The difference between the first and the second is that first phonetically has more prominent pauses and to transform into the sentence in the second type some syntactical changes should be made.
Here comes Harry, who is a nice-looking guy.
- Proleptical constructions. These are utterances beginning with the nomination of the theme of the utterance (a noun) after which the rheme comes bearing descriptive, decoding the theme character.
Jack, I never met him in my whole life. (Ср.рус. Деньги, их у меня сроду-то не было.)
- Anticipational constructions. Anticipation is a process in some sense opposite to prolepsis and means taking the rheme to the first place of the utterance. The theme of the utterance as the noun finishes the construction:
I never met him in my whole life, Jack.
- The nominal utterance with post-positional detailing theme. In such construction there is no thematic component or it is not clear and needs detailization; this thematic nominal component is given immediately after nominative utterance:
A terribly posh place, that restaurant.
(Ср.рус. Очень умные животные, эти волки).
- Inversion. Of course, it differs from grammatical inversion (in questions). The examples of colloquial inversion are the utterances of the type:
A hopeless old fool I am; And a nice cup of tea you shall have, my dear. (Ср.рус. Глупыми были её вопросы, глупыми были и мои ответы).
- The formation of speech in question – answer type. Usually questions and answers are alternated in dialogues. But in monologues it is also possible (the questions to himself). Have I found a good job? Yes, I have. Do I make enough money? Yes, I do. Can I send my kids to college now? Yes, I can. What else do they want of me? (Ср.рус. Я в магазин сходил? Сходил. Все продукты купил? Купил . Сдачу принёс ? Принёс . Что ещё нужно ?)
- Echo-questions. This feature should differ from real echo-question when the listener didn’t understand something or misheard. The examples of colloquial echo-questions are: Do you think Mary Beautiful? – Beautiful? In a way; How about having a cup of tea? – A cup of tea? Sounds good to me.
- Repetition. Any elements of the sentence structure can repeat, though more often it happens with words of attributive meaning: Sad, sad, all that is very sad; This house is perfect, just perfect for my purposes.
- The usage of appellative pronouns. Sometimes such pronouns are used to attract the interlocutor’s attention to his words. I am saying this to you, old devil, you.
- Interjectional indication of interrogation. In colloquial speech question often is constructed not in accord with rules of grammar, but with the help of interjections, added to the declarative form of the utterance: Nice weather, ah?
- The ellipsis of the link-verb. It is characteristic for those languages where the existence of link-verb is obligatory in norm, as for example, in English:
My bank account empty, my credit card lost, my purse stolen – what shall I do?
- Explicatives. Under them we understand lexical element of full nomination, performing a definite syntactical function, though superfluous for the sentence (informal words, phraseological units…) What the hell are you doing here? Remove that bloody car of yours! I don’t care about that damned garage.
- Periphrasis. It can be considered as a feature of colloquial speech when it has surplus character from the communicative point of view. For example, Yes. They say… Perfectly true; Yes, indeed instead of Yes!, and instead of No! – By no means; No way; Nothing of the kind.
- Imperative expressions without verbs. Usually imperative sentences are formed with imperative mood form of the verb. Though in colloquial speech different constructions can be used for such purpose, the general feature of which is the absence of verbal lexeme, for example, substantial utterances (Waiter, the bill please!), adjectival utterances (Careful! You’ll break it.), adverbial utterances (Slowly, slowly, please! Out of please), interjectional utterances (Shhh! You’ll wake him up).
- Negation in the form of question. To the opposite to normal word order for questions, the interrogative forms with the meaning of negation are often used in colloquial speech. Did I say anything about you being foolish? ( А разве я имею что - нибудь против ?)
- The declarative form of the question. In colloquial speech the rules of constructing interrogative sentences are neglected and only intonation is used to denote a question. You know the answer? She is going with you to London?
- The statement in the form of negative question. In stylistics this process is called rythorical question and is characterized as related to elevated style. But the study of colloquial speech shows that it’s widespread in conversation as much as in prose or poetry. Wasn’t I careful enough to you? Didn’t I tell you what to do?
- The ellipsis of the subject. The ellipsis of the subject occurs when the situation and the context of communication allow to identify it clearly. As a rule, the subject in the form of the pronoun in the first person is omitted. Can’t say how glad I am!
- The ellipsis of the subject and the predicate. Sometimes, in oral speech, especially in a dialogue, both main parts of the sentence suffer ellipsis. At the same time, this segment of conversation remains informally adequate. When? – At 5 p.m. – Where to? – To the restaurant.
- The ellipsis of functional words of the sentence. Such process is also characteristic for colloquial speech – articles, prepositions, conjunctions Uncle George comes Saturday; Where does he live? – Paris. Articles are omitted in the cases when the situation or the context make the referent clear. The prepositions of place and time are usually omitted. What conjunctions can be omitted is very difficult to decide as sometimes it’s impossible to find if the conjunction is omitted or its absence was thought over beforehand.
We described the main features of colloquial speech, but this list is not a completed one and some features are typical for other registers of speech also.
Grammar of conversation
The grammar of conversation represents the spoken language, it has been little researched until recently, when the advent of sizable computer corpora have made such research feasible for the first time. The conversation is the most commonplace, everyday variety of language, from which, if anything, the written variety, acquired through painstaking and largely institutional processes of education.
Before going further, we present a conversational extract (labeled “Damn chilli”) which illustrates many typical grammatical features of conversation.
“Damn chilli”
A family of four is sitting down to dinner; P is the mother, J the father, and D (David) and M (Michael) are their 20-year-old and 17-year-old sons.
D1: Mom, I, give me a rest, give it a rest. I didn’t think about you, I mean, I would rather do it <unclear> some other instance in my mind.
P1: Yeah, well I can understand you know, I mean <unclear> Hi, I’m David’s mother, try to ignore me.
D2: I went with a girl like you once. Let’s serve this damn chilli.
M1: Okay, let’s serve the chilli. Are you serving or not dad?
J1: Doesn’t matter.
P2: Would you get those chips in there. Michael, could you put them with the crackers.
J2: Here, I’ll come and serve it honey if you want me to.
P3: Oh wait, we still have quite a few.
D3: I don’t see any others.
P4: I know you don’t
D4: We don’t have any others.
P5: Yes, I got you the big bag I think it will be a help to you.
J3: Here’s mom’s.
M2: Now this isn’t according to grandpa now.
P6: Okay.
M3: The same man who told me it’s okay <unclear>
P7: Are you going to put water in our cups? Whose bowl is that.
M4: Mine.
P8: Mike put all the water in here. Well, here we are.
J4: What.
P9: Will y’all turn off the TV.
J5: Pie, I’ll kill you, I said I’d take you to the bathroom.
P10: Man, get your tail out of the soup – Oh, sorry – Did you hear I saw Sarah’s sister’s baby?
M5: How is it?
P11: She’s cute, pretty really.
A functional survey of conversation.
Conversation cannot be easily characterized in terms of communicative goals or social functions. It is a pervasive activity among human beings, and that its primary function appears to be to establish and maintain social cohesion through the sharing of experience, although secondarily it may promote other goals such as entertainment, exchange of information and control of other’s behaviour. There are several characteristics of conversation which define its grammar:
1) Conversation takes place in speech – by use of an oral-auditory channel.
2) Conversation takes place in shared context. Conversation is typically carried out in face-to-face interaction with others, e.g. family members or friends, with whom we share a great deal of contextual background. Face-to-face interaction means that we share not just as immediate physical context of time and space, but a large amount of specific social, cultural and institutional knowledge.
In keeping with this shared knowledge, conversation is marked grammatically by a very high frequency of pronouns, as contrasted with a very low frequency of nouns. The user of personal pronouns normally assumes that we share knowledge of the intended reference of you, she, it, etc. This sharing of situational knowledge is most obvious in the case of first and second person pronouns (especially I and you) which, referring directly to participants in the conversation, are the most common in this variety. Pronoun reference, however, represents only the most common variety of grammatical reduction that characterizes conversation, others being the use of ellipsis or of substitute proforms. In the extract “Damn chilli”, substitution is illustrated by:
I mean, I would rather do it. And both substitution and ellipsis (signaled by < -- >) are illustrated in this sequence of turns:
Here, I’ll come and serve it honey if you want me to <>
Oh, wait, we still have quite a few.
I don’t see any others.
I know you don’t <>
The frequency of ellipsis shows up especially in situational ellipsis (J1), in ellipsis across turns (P4) and also commonly in answers to questions.
3) Conversation avoids elaboration or specification of meaning
4) Conversation is interactive. Conversation is co-constructed by two or more interlocutors, dynamically adapting their expression on the ongoing exchange. The to-and-fro movement of conversation between speaker and hearer is evident in the occurrence of utterances which by their nature either form a response, or elicit a response. In conversational analysis, these utterance – response sequences, known as adjacency pairs, may be either symmetric, as in the case of one greeting echoing another, or asymmetric, such as a sequence of question followed by answer.
Questions and imperatives, the sentence types that typically elicit a response, are more frequent in conversation than in written language. Many response forms lack the full syntactic articulation of the clause, which is understandable, since they rely on the context created by the preceding turn. These insert often have a stereotyped initiating or responding function within an adjacency – pair framework:
Greetings – hi
Farewells – bye
Backchannels – uh huh
Response elicitors – okay
Among the types of interrogative structure in conversation, about one in four questions are question tags. The important point about question tags, here, is that they add an interrogative force to a declarative one, combining assertion with a request for confirmation, thus illustrating the characteristic “negotiation” or co-construction of meaning between interlocutors.
The peripheral adverbs, stance adverbials and linking adverbials have a discoursal function, being markers respectively of the speaker’s attitude to what is said, and of a link or translation between neighboring parts of the discourse. Therefore and however are used to signpost the logical and argumentative links between one part of the discourse and another, anyway and so are used more dynamically and interpersonally, to signal transitions in the interactive development of discourse.
These interaction signals shade into discourse markers. These include some single word inserts, like well and now as utterance introducers, as well as formulaic clausal forms such as the inevitable I mean and you know. In conversation, discourse markers can be said to have a “discourse management” function, which they share broadly with vocatives or address forms.
5) Conversation is expressive of politeness, emotion, and attitude. The interactive nature of conversation extends to the use of polite or respectful language in exchanges such as requests, greetings, offers and apologies (thanks, thank you, please, bye, sorry…). The conversational routines are historically derived by ellipsis from more elaborated, clausal expressions, but for the purposes of present-day English grammar they are best regarded as analyzed formulae. Vocatives such as sir and madam also have a respectful role, although such honorific forms are rare in English compared with many other languages. More typical of English is the use of stereotypic polite openings such as the interrogative forms would you and could you, functioning as requests in “Damn chilli”:
P2: Would you get those chips in there. Michael, could you put them with the crackers.
However, it must not be supposed that conversation preserves polite norms all of the time.
6) Conversation takes place in real time. Conversation is typically spontaneous, so that speakers are continually faced with the need both to plan and to execute their utterances in real time, “online” or “on the fly”. Consequently, conversation is characterized by what has been called “normal disfluency”. It is quite natural for a speaker’s flow to be impaired by pauses, hesitators (er, um), and repetitions, such as I – I – I at points where the need to keep talking threatens to run ahead of mental planning, and the planning needs to catch up.
However, we should also note the importance of a phenomenon the opposite of that above: where the speaker knows pretty well what to say, and indeed the hearer may to some extent share that knowledge. Here planning runs ahead of speech production. To save time and energy, speakers aim to reduce the length of what they have to say.
Speed of repartee, making an opportune remark, getting “a word in edgeways” in a lively dialogue, or reaching the point quickly, may all add urgency to the spoken word. In fact, in conversation speed of communication can vary a great deal according to the needs of encoding and decoding. In a familiar context, where many of the words to be uttered are largely predictable, devices for reducing the length of utterances are likely to be routinely employed. In phonological terms, fast, informal speech is often marked by effort – reducing features such as elision and assimilation. Although such features are not directly visible in our orthographic transcriptions, a reduction of length may also be readily observed on the levels of morphology and syntax, through contractions and other morphologically reduced forms, and the types of ellipsis.
One common effort – saving device in conversation is the use of contractions: reduced enclitic forms of the verb and of the negative particle. Another is situational ellipsis taking the form of the omission of words of low information value. This type of ellipsis is termed “situational” because the missing elements are retrievable through situational knowledge, rather than through anaphoric reference to a previous mention. However, it is often a condition of this type of ellipsis that the elements omitted are so stereotyped as to be predictable in any situation. Situational ellipsis gives rise to sentences which fail to conform to the ideal of sentence grammar – where every sentence has a finite verb and every finite verb has a subject: Got a pen? Didn’t know it was yours.
In fact, very often the omission of subject and operator result in an utterance or clause lacking any verb at all. No problem.
Quite apart from this, the syntax of conversation differs from the “sentence grammar” typical of planned writing in ways which bear the marks of online planning pressure. In “Damn chilli”, the last turn (P11) has a structure scarcely paralleled in written English, where that last two words pretty really are tagged on to the simple clause She’s cute, elaborating and modifying retrospectively the intended meaning of cute. Prefaces placed respectively before and after a clause, elaborating part of the meaning:
Cos Brenda whose horse I ride up at Bridley – I was telling her.
The effect of such devices is to eliminate complex phrases from the body of the clause, where they could cause processing hold-ups both for the speaker and the hearer.
7) Conversation has a restricted and repetitive repertoire. Speakers often repeat partially or exactly what has just been said in the conversation, thus relieving online planning pressure by a device which may be called local repetition. However, conversation is repetitive in a more global sense, in that it relies more on stereotyped, prefabricated sequences of words lexical bundles.
Another piece of evidence for stereotyped verbal repertoire in conversation is the low type – taken ratio. This tendency also shows up in our grammatical analysis in the steepness of rank – frequency curves for vocabulary filling particular syntactic roles. For example, the particularly high frequency of modal auxiliaries in conversation is largely due to the extremely common use of the modals will, can, would and could.
Thus, conversation employs a vernacular range of expression. Conversation typically takes place privately between people who know one another, perhaps intimately: it is remote from and little influenced by traditions of prestige and correctness often associated with publicly available written texts, where the English language is “on its best behavior”.
References
1. Blokh M.Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar. – M., 2000. – p.229-236, 261-272
2 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Longman, 2003
LINGUISTICS OF THE TEXT
1. Text as an object of research. Basic elements of the text
2. The features of the text
3.The linguistic means of textual connections
4. Types of contexts
5. Text and discourse
Terms: text, discourse, textual units, supra-phrasal unity, cumuleme, occurseme, paragraph, stylistic load, retrospect, prospect, category of author, cohesion, representation, substitution, context
Дата: 2019-03-05, просмотров: 547.