Riassunto esame lingua inglese, prof. Heaney, libro consigliato The language of Speech and writing, Cornbleet, Carter

Writing

Writing is to form words with letters. Writing has subskills: spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. Other writing subskills, which form part of the later education process, are organizational features like sentence and paragraph construction, link words, and cohesive devices. Conventions of text structure include the organization of information, degrees of formality, style, and formulaic expressions (e.g., "Yours faithfully").

Writing is permanent, distant, planned, formal, and linear (as it follows a SVO language: subject-verb-object). It is a process; we may rewrite something or delete something. When we write, we keep in consideration:

Context, purpose, and receiver

Context: The physical environment in which the text is created will change the nature of writing.

Purpose: We have a purpose in mind for communicating in the medium and style we choose. The purpose may or may not be achieved.

Receiver (reader): Writing is:

• Planned
• Permanent and crosses the boundaries of space and time
• A process made up of subskills
• Purpose-driven, determining whether we communicate in writing or speech, the format, and the style and language
• Written to be read, with an intended readership in mind

The nature of speaking

Speaking is combining sounds in a recognized and systematic way according to specific principles to form meaningful utterances. Speech is made up of a combination of features:

• Sounds: Individual phonemes combine to form words. A phonetic alphabet is used to represent sounds in writing as, in English, sounds and spelling don’t always correspond.
• Intonation: In English, there are two basic patterns: rising and falling. The voice falls to mark the end of a phrase and rises to indicate the speaker’s intention to continue, indicate a question, or reflect attitudes such as surprise or disbelief.
• Rhythm: English is a stress-timed language. To maintain the rhythm, English has weak and strong sounds.
• Pitch: The voice can get louder or softer for many reasons, such as mood or emphasis.
• Pace: Often related to pitch. Louder speech tends to be slower, while softer speech is faster.

Appropriateness

We constantly change the way we speak and what we speak about. We develop an awareness of how to speak appropriately in different situations and to different people, varying degrees of formality. Most people tend to feel more at ease talking with people they know rather than strangers. We tend to prefer small groups rather than large ones and to keep personal matters among intimates. We function better in informal situations rather than formal ones and avoid confrontational or awkward situations.

Context, purpose, and receiver in speaking

Context: The context in which we speak.

Purpose: Speech performs a function; we can make a promise, a threat, etc. Sometimes it is explicit, sometimes not.

Receiver (listener): Can help to shape the discourse, influencing what is said.

Example: Activity: private chat, Receiver: a friend, Context: walking home, Topic: the night before, Purpose: gossip.

Aspects of speech

Participants, degree of familiarity, age, gender, status (hierarchical positions), shared background/cultural knowledge, activity type.

Differences between speech and writing

• Speech: Time-bound, transient, dynamic. Part of an interaction in which participants are present. The speaker has a particular addressee in mind.
• Writing: Space-bound, static, permanent. It generally results from distance between reader and writer.
• Spontaneity and speed make planning difficult. Thinking while you talk involves looser construction: rephrasing, repetition, and comment clauses.
• Writing allows repeated reading and close analysis. It promotes the development of careful organization and compact expression, often with intricate sentence construction.
• Intonation and pauses divide long utterances into manageable chunks. However, boundaries are often unclear.
• Units of discourse (sentences and paragraphs) are usually easy to identify.
• As participants are face-to-face, they are helped by extralinguistic cues such as facial expression and gesture to aid meaning.
• Most writing avoids deictic expressions because they can be ambiguous. Writers have to anticipate the problems posed by the time lag and the variety of recipients in different settings.
• Many words and constructions are characteristic of informal speech. Long coordinated sentences are normal and can be quite complex. Nonsense vocabulary or vague words are not normally written, nor is slang or obscenity. Contractions tend to be avoided in writing.
• Some words and constructions are more characteristic of writing, such as multiple instances of subordination in the same sentence. Some legal documents have long sentences that spread over various pages. Certain items of vocabulary are never spoken.
• Speech is suited to social or phatic functions. It is suited to expressing personal opinions and feelings thanks to the nuances that prosody and non-linguistic features allow.
• Writing is particularly suited to recording facts and communicating ideas, and to tasks of memorizing and learning. Written texts are easier to store and scan for information. They can be read at speeds that suit the recipient.
• Utterances can be revised in progress by starting again or adding a qualification. But errors once spoken cannot be withdrawn. Speakers must live with the consequences. Interruptions are normal and usually audible.
• Errors and perceived inadequacies can be eliminated without the reader ever knowing of their existence. Interruptions that may have occurred in the writing process are also invisible.
• Unique features of speech include most of the prosody. The many nuances of intonation, contrasts of tempo, rhythm, and other tones of voice are difficult to convey in writing.
• Unique features of writing include pages, lines, punctuation, and capitalization. Only a few graphic conventions relate to prosody (!?). Some written genres cannot be read aloud efficiently and must be assimilated visually.

Conversation

A large part of conversation is "phatic conversation": it has the purpose to establish or maintain personal relationships. It tends to follow traditional patterns like the expressions: "How are you?" "Fine, thanks." Language is part of our identity. Accent refers to the sound quality, the sound of the individual phonemes, while dialect covers particular use of lexis and grammar.

Structure of conversation

According to Brown and Yule (1983), there are two main forms of conversation:

• Transactional – sp...