First Published in 1992. This is an exploration of the complex kinds of variation which occur in and between written and spoken English. Dialect, Pidgeon and Creole English are examined and the types of lingustics employed in advertising, literature and the classroom are discussed. The book is intended as an introduction to the study of English language. It is aimed primarily at college and university students, particularly thosed who are likely to find themselves teaching a language. It may also appeal to teachers, the general reader and sixth form pupils.
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Yes, you can access Variety in Contemporary English by W.R. O'Donnell,LORETO Todd in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Filología & Lingüística. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
In the modern world, with its networks of communication, it is very unlikely that there remains a single community that has somehow or other managed to escape ‘discovery’. But if such a community does exist, there is one thing about it of which we can be entirely certain: its members are able to communicate very complex messages to one another by means of speech. So fundamental is this ability to human society that we should find it difficult to imagine a community of truly human beings which lacked it.
On the other hand, it would surprise nobody to discover that communication by writing was unknown to our hypothetical community. It remained unknown to many flourishing human societies in the past, indeed to most of them, and it continues to be unknown to very large numbers of people even today.
But, of course, there are many societies which do possess this additional mode of communication. These tend to be the technologically advanced communities. Just as speech is a defining characteristic of ‘humanness’, so may writing be regarded as a defining characteristic of technological advancement. This is mainly because the relative permanence of writing makes it possible to overcome limitations of time and space in passing on useful knowledge from person to person,
Evidently, English-speaking communities are among those which have access to both means of communication: both speech and writing. And so, before we go on to discuss other kinds of variety, we propose to take a look at how English varies between these two modes. We hope in doing so to illuminate not only the relationship of the two to one another, but also that between them both and language.
Having both means of communication available is not a simple matter of having an alternative. Indeed, it is not in any sense at all a simple matter. However, we can make it easier to understand if we consider the relationship between speech and writing from a number of different, but related, points of view. Accordingly our discussion will be divided into four sections:
Substance Operation Use Acquisition
In order to understand what is implied here by the term ‘substance’, it is necessary to perceive that speech and writing are not themselves language, but rather vehicles, or mediums, for language.
The distinction is probably in need of some elaboration. It is not the kind of distinction which may be verified directly by the senses, but rather one that has to be constructed by the mind and one which, accordingly, needs careful thought before it is properly understood. There are, of course, many distinctions which can be verified directly by the senses: cats and dogs; rough and smooth; chalk and cheese. Our intellects are barely engaged in perceiving such distinctions, because both the elements distinguished exist in the concrete, observable world. The difficulty about distinguishing language from medium arises because only one of the elements, medium, exists in that world. The other element, language, belongs in the abstract, theoretical world, which is impossible to observe directly.
A helpful analogy is available in the distinction between money on the one hand, and the monetary system on the other. By money is meant the pieces of metal and paper we carry around with us in order to be able to buy the things we want. Clearly money is concrete and observable. However, the values attributed to individual coins and banknotes are not related to their intrinsic worth. There is no real sense, for instance, in which one hundred of the pieces of metal we call ‘pence’ are worth one of the pieces we call ‘pound’. The values of these things are, rather, extrinsic; that is to say, these values are conferred from outside, in fact by the community. But these values are not conferred at random. They are conferred by reference to an abstract system of values in terms of which their relationship to one another is defined. This abstract system is the monetary system, and coins and banknotes are thus merely tokens representing particular points in the monetary system. Coins and banknotes may be changed by the community so far as their size, shape and composition are concerned, with relatively little inconvenience; as indeed happens from time to time. But any change in the abstract system in terms of which we assign values to the individual tokens causes great upheaval, and may take several years to accomplish.
The alternative to having money linked to an abstract system of (monetary) values is to have a barter system, which operates on the basis of intrinsic values; so many goats for so much flour, for example. But language does not function in this way. The noises we make and the marks we inscribe have, generally speaking, no intrinsic language value, but function rather in the manner of coins and banknotes; as tokens, carriers of a value conferred upon them by reference to the abstract language system. Our speech and our writing mean nothing of themselves. They only mean something if we can relate them to the language system. Thus, when you hear spoken a language you do not know, you can perceive the medium, may even be able to recognise and repeat correctly some recurring patterns of sound, but you are not able to attach any meaning to the sounds because you cannot relate them to the appropriate abstract system in terms of which alone those noises rnake sense, have meaning, to the people who make them.
The distinction the reader is being asked to perceive is represented, somewhat simplistically, in Figure 1.
Figure 1
Perhaps we can make this figure clearer by means of a particular instance. Thus, in English and many other languages a distinction is made between ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. Ignoring the few exceptional cases, the tokens by which this abstract distinction is made concrete in English are as follows:
(a) speech
singular:
; e.g. cat, dog, horse
plural: /s/, e.g. in cats
or /z/, e.g. in dogs
or/Iz), e.g. in horses.
That is, the base form without addition is assigned the value singular, and the base form with the addition of sounds /s/ or /z/ or /Iz/ (depending on the phonetic context) has the value plural.
(b) writing
singular:
plural: (-s); e.g. in cats, dogs and horses
(-es); e.g. in matches
Such distinctions may be set out as in Figure 2. (It should be noted in passing that codes such as Morse Code and drum ‘language’ are parasitic, in that they cannot be interpreted unless they are first related to the appropriate medium; writing in the case of Morse, and speech in the case of drums. However, ‘signing’ among deaf people, as distinct from simple finger spelling, should probably be regarded as a different medium.)
It is important to observe, with reference to Figure 2, that in understanding the singular/plural distinction it is not necessary either to say aloud what has been written down, or to write down what has been said aloud. It is possible to perceive a singular or a plural ending in either medium, without any reference whatsoever to the other.
Figure 2
However, the main point of Figure 2 is this: many languages, though not all, distinguish singular from plural, but no two languages signal that distinction in exactly the same way. On the other hand, most languages will make some use of the sound /s/, let us say, but there will be no other language in which it performs exactly the function it does in English with regard to signifying plural.
In terms of this figure it should be clear that knowing English is not just a matter of being able to detect and reproduce significant differences of sound, any more than it is only a matter of understanding such a distinction as that between singular and plural. Rather, knowing English, or knowing any language, consists in being able to relate the two: to understand, that is, just which distinctions in sound (or in writing) correspond to which abstract distinctions in the mind.
Moreover, since either medium may, as we noted above, function independently of the other, it should be equally clear that it is erroneous to regard writingas just a means of recording speech. Instead, we must regard the two as different substances having concrete existence in the real world, and able to take varying shapes, as it were, and signify abstract distinctions in the mind. In a word, the two are ‘mediums’, just as metal and paper are mediums for an abstract monetary system, except, of course, that language systems are much more complex.
It has to be admitted that many very eminent linguists, including Leonard Bloomfield, the most influential linguist of his day, have taken a different view of the relationship between speech and writing from the one explained above. It is generally argued by such scholars that writing is a relatively recent development in mankind’s linguistic behaviour—with many languages existing only in spoken form even today—and consequently that writing is only a secondary medium, parasitic on speech, the latter alone being the true object of the linguist’s study. Some have gone so far as virtually to identify Language with speech; the following quotation is fairly representative: ‘…a language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group co-operates’ (Bloch and Trager, p. 5). However, the position we have adopted and attempted to explain is probably the more widely-held view at the present time, and seems to us the more reasonable.
The substances of the two mediums differ from one another in every important particular. The substance of speech is sound. When you speak, what you actually do is expel air, just as you do when breathing out, except that you disturb and modify the air at various points in its journey from the lungs to the outside atmosphere. These disturbances can be detected by the eardrums of everyone within ‘earshot’. The disturbances follow one another—fairly rapidly—in time, requiring little effort or preparation to produce and needing no extra equipment or tool; we simply adapt certain body organs for the purpose. However, this substance suffers from two important disadvantages; (a) it does not last, and (b) it is effective only over relatively short distances.
The possibilities offered by such devices as the telephone and the taperecorder modify the validity of this last statement to some extent. Nowadays, after all, it is possible to carry such devices around with you and speak to someone on the other side of the world almost as easily as you can to someone standing by your side, or record important conversations and memoranda at will. Nevertheless, the statement is still true in general. These devices are really relatively rare and their use exceptional. They are remote from the experience of most of humanity, and were entirely absent from our history. Characteristically, therefore, speech is subject to the limitations we have specified.
By contrast, think of what you do when you write. First, you have to hold a tool of some kind in your hand, or perhaps tap on a machine, in order to produce marks on a contrasting background. These are perceived by the eye, not by the ear; and so quite distinct senses are involved. Furthermore, the substance of writing is organised in space; not in time. It is also produced somewhat more laboriously than speech, but on the other hand, once produced it is relatively permanent and easy to transport, and so writing may be effective over great distances of space and time. These differences between the two substances are summed up for convenience in Figure 3.
Figure 3
From the point of view of their respective substances, therefore, speech and writing differ totally. It follows that there can be no necessary relationship between the two mediums, and, as we have already remarked, either medium may function in complete independence of the other, so that we do not need to read something aloud in order to understand it, or alternatively, write something down in order to understand it.
And yet, as we all know, it is possible to write down what is said, or say what is written down, if desired. For instance, lecturers preparing lectures will often write down what they later propose to say aloud and, by the same token, their students may write down at least some of what they hear. Though there is no necessary relationship between the two totally different substances of speech and writing, therefore, there must clearly be some conventional link between the two to make it possible to transpose from one to the other.
It is important to appreciate that this link is in principle distinct from the conventional links we have seen to exist between each of the mediums, on the one hand, and the language system, on the other. In other words, the ability to say aloud what has been written down, and write down what has been said is not dependent upon understanding. For instance, the reader should have no difficulty in speaking aloud the following passage correctly at first sight, though it is unlikely that many readers will understand it completely at a first reading
Since the elements in a field are always subordinated to the whole, every local modification engendering a refashioning of the ensemble, the first law of perceptual totalities is that the whole, over and beyond its having quantitative features of its own, has a quantitative value different from the sum of its parts.(J.Piaget, Structuralism, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971)
It follows, then, that the conventional link must be a direct one between the two substances, one in which units of some kind perceived in one substance relate to units of a different kind in an entirely dissimilar substance. In other words, what we have is a position such as that shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4
The origin of the link between the two substances lies in the fact that speech developed first in human society, and for a very long time was the only medium. Accordingly, when writing proper eventually did begin to develop it was possible, and clearly in many ways advantageous, to identify units of the writing system with units derived from an analysis, however impressionistic, of the spoken language. Thus it is that all contemporary writing systems, though they differ radically from one another in many respects, at least agree in being based upon symbols which correspond to units perceived in the spoken language.
The units of the spoken language to which the written symbols correspond need not be units of sound. Traditional Chinese writing, for instance, is based upon characters which correspond to units of meaning, and the same characters may be pronounced quite differently in different dialects of Chinese. Such a system is not so remote from our own experience as we may suppose. Thus, any literate European would understand the character ‘2’, let us say, but speakers of different languages would pronounce it quite differently from one another.
However, apart from a few odd symbols, e.g. £, +, =, 2, 3, etc., the English writing system is not of this type. It is what is called an ‘alphabetic’ system. That is to say, the writing system of English is based upon an inventory of symbols, called ‘letters’, which correspond, though very roughly, to units perceived in the stream of sound. These sound units are not actual segments of speech, but rather idealisations of actual segments. They are called ‘phonemes’. A writing system which provided for a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes would be a ‘phonemic’ alphabet. No actual lang...
