The grammar of spoken language
Richard Hudson
Thinking analytically about spoken language is hard, for much the same reason as
bird-spotting: the thing we want to observe and analyse just won’t sit still. It’s also
hard to think about grammar, though for a different reason: because it’s abstract, so
what you see isn’t necessarily as it seems. Put the two together, and you have a real
intellectual challenge. So how can you think analytically about the grammar of
spoken language?
The first thing is to freeze the specimen by writing it down. Here’s part of a
transcription that a colleague once sent me. The speakers are London teen-agers, so
maybe not very different from you (except that they were teen-agers in about 1990).
(1)
(2)
(3)
Where you going now Chantel?
Dunno ...
Where's Tasha gone, shops?
I’ve numbered the lines for convenience, so that each contribution to the conversation
has a different number – a useful convention. Otherwise this kind of transcription is
simply a matter of writing down exactly what you hear with the help of ordinary
conventions of writing such as punctuation and the spelling “dunno”.
Now that the specimen is pinned down to the paper, you can analyse it. Let’s
examine its grammatical patterns. What’s specifically ‘spoken’ about it, and how
different is it from written grammar?
Start with the individual words. Are there any words that can be spoken but
not written? Yes, the word “dunno” in line (2). In ordinary writing, this would have to
be “don’t know” or even “do not know”; but does that mean that we never write
“dunno”? Clearly not, because my transcription uses it, and no doubt you can think of
cases where you might write it yourself. So you might ask yourself why we should
have a conventional spelling for a word that we never use in ordinary writing. I’ll
leave you to think about that.
Then there are the more abstract patterns. Are there any points where you feel
that a word is missing, in the sense that you know what it would be, but it’s simply
not there? Yes, in fact every line gives an example.
In (1) we know that “are” is missing after “where”, so this could have been
“Where are you going now Chantel?” But that observation is just the start of a little
research project on the principles that govern spoken language. Why is it possible to
omit “are” here? Is it because we can omit any word we want in really casual speech
(especially if we’re really lazy, which you may think these speakers are)? No, that
can’t be right. Try omitting “you” as well: “Where going now Chantel?” – surely no
English speaker would say that? Some words can be omitted, and others can’t – and
what decides that is the grammar of English. In technical terms, some auxiliary verbs
such as BE and HAVE can be omitted after an interrogative pronoun; so “where are
you going” can be reduced to “where you going”, but “where you going” can’t then
be reduced to “where going”.
The other reductions both show the workings of different parts of the grammar
of spoken English. In (2), “I don’t know” has been chopped down to the bare bones of
“dunno”, thanks to a special arrangement for suppressing little words (such as “I”) at
the start of an utterance. In contrast, (3) looks as though “to the shops” has been
reduced to “shops”; but we have to be careful, because we wouldn’t say that “home”
was a reduced form of “to the home”. Could this speaker say “Tasha has gone shops”,
parallelling “Tasha has gone home”? If not, maybe this is another example of little
words being suppressed at the start of an utterance. As before, you can use these
examples as a springboard for exploring an area of the grammar of spoken English.
Reduced words such as “dunno” and omitted words are one of the most
obvious ways in which spoken English follows different grammatical rules from
written English. They’re a good way into exploring how spoken language works,
though there will always be plenty of other things to look at in your specimen.