is no single, absolute difference between speech and writing in English; rather there are several dimensions of variation, and particular types of speech and writing are more or less similar with respect to each dimension.
Pons (2000: 196) also reaches the conclusion that, in Spanish, the differences between spoken and written language are superficial from the point of view of Textual Linguistics and authors report the existence of different degrees of spontaneity (Castellà 1992), registers (Payrató 1996) or intermediate genres (Briz 2001), which involve traces of spoken language in written language and vice versa.
In spite of these corpus-based proposals, there are features of language which are – or have traditionally been – prototypically attributed to spoken or to written language, basing the definition of spoken or written language on ‘maximally differentiated samples’ (Chafe 1982: 49), such as spontaneous conversation vs formal academic prose (Tannen 1982). For instance, Biber (1988: 5) repeatedly uses expressions such as ‘typically written’ or ‘typically spoken’ in his empirical analyses and notes that: ‘[t];he general view is that written language is structurally elaborated, complex, formal, and abstract, while spoken language is concrete, context-dependent, and structurally simple’.
This view informs Table 4, which offers a summary of language features prototypically attributed to spoken and written language. It should not be understood as a comprehensive summary, but rather as a guide of potentially interesting features that can be found in the analysis of television dialogue and subtitling. Whenever language features can be directly contrasted, they are shown in parallel in Table 4.
Table 4. Summary of features typically attributed to spoken and written language
| LANGUAGE MODE | ||
| Spoken (spontaneous) | Written (prepared) | Reference |
| Lexical features | ||
| certain idiomatic expressions | Briz (2001) | |
| jargon | Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) Briz (2001) | |
| • colloquial language • relaxed production | • strict rules • controlled style | Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) Nagel et al. (2009) |
| shorter words | longer words | Drieman (1962) |
| marked by dialect, sociolect or idiolect | difficulty to portray nuances of language variation | Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) Nagel et al. (2009) |
| (frequent) topic of conversation: daily routine | greater abstractness | DeVito (1967) Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) |
| • intensifiers • hedges | • fewer quantifiers • fewer hedges | DeVito (1967) Sanger (1998) Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) |
| lexical exploitation in everyday conversation: esp. metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole | creative use of the language (written literature) | Chafe (1982) Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) Hanks (2013a) |
| • code-switching • language interference | Espuny (1998) Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) | |
| • lexical repetition • redundance | • no lexical repetition • no redundance | Freixa (1998) Sanger (1998) Briz (2001) Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) |
| • (markers of) vagueness • non-explicitation | • lexical density • terminological density (scientific and technical texts) | Halliday (1985) Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) Gelpí (1998) Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) |
| • cues for personal narration (I’m like …) • expression of hesitation • fillers • reinforcers • appellation • tagging | Objectivity (impersonal, passive clauses / third person) | Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) Alcoba and de Luque (1998) Sanger (1998) Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) |
| • reference to shared knowledge/deixis • personal deixis • trust in contextual comprehension | fewer words that refer to the speaker | DeVito (1967) Briz and Val. Es. Co. (2000) Calsamiglia and Tusón (2007) |
| Morphosyntactic features | ||
| more verbs | more nouns |
more attributive adjectives
Drieman (1962)
Tannen (
|
