1. Differences between Spoken
and Written Discourse
Lecture 3:
Source: Paltridge, p.p. 13-19

2. Objectives
 Students should be able to:
2. List the differences between spoken and
Written discourse
3. For each difference, explain the commonly
held view and its rebuttal, if any.
4. Explain McCarthy’s view of a continuum.

3. Outline
 I. General Differences between Spoken
and Written Discourse (Slides 4-13)
 II. A Continuum View (Slides 14- 19)

4. I. General Differences
 1. Grammatical intricacy
 2. Lexical density
 3. Nominalization
 4. Explicitness
 5. Contextualization
 6. Spontaneity
 7. Repetition, hesitations, and redundancy

5. 1. Grammatical Intricacy
 View:
Written discourse is more structurally
complex and more elaborate than spoken
discourse .
In other words, sentences in spoken
discourse are short and simple, whereas
they are longer and more complex in
written discourse.

6. 1. Grammatical Intricacy
 Rebuttal: Halliday argues that spoken
discourse is NOT less organized. He
claims that spoken discourse has its own
kind of complexity.
 In spoken discourse clauses are long and
spread out => Spoken discourse can be
grammatically intricate as well.

7. 2. Lexical Density
 Lexical density refers to the ratio of content
words (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs) to grammatical or function words
(e.g. pronouns, prepositions, articles) within
a clause.
 View: Spoken discourse is less lexically
dense than written discourse. Content
words tend to be spread out over a number
of clauses, whereas they seem to be tightly
packed into individual clauses. (See extracts
p. 15)

8. 3. Nominalization
 Nominalization refers to presenting actions
and events as nouns rather than as verbs.
 View:
 Written discourse has a high level of
nominalization: i.e. more nouns than verbs.
 Written discourse tends to have longer
noun groups than spoken discourse. (See
extracts bottom of p. 15 and the second
extract on p. 16)

9. 4. Explicitness
View:
Writing is more explicit than speech.
Rebuttal:
-This is not always true.
-It depends on the purpose of text.
A writer/speaker can state something
explicitly or infer it depending on many
variables.

10. 5. Contextualization
 Contextualization refers to the extent
knowledge of context is needed to
interpret a text.
 View:
Writing is more decontextualized than
speech: Speech is more attached to
context than writing because speech
depends on a shared situation and
background for interpretation.

11. 5. Contextualization
 Rebuttal:
 This may be true of conversations, but
not in all types of spoken discourses.
Some types of written discourse may
show high dependence on shared
contextual knowledge, e.g. personal
letters between friends.

12. 6. Spontaneity
 View:
b. Spoken discourse lacks organization and is
ungrammatical because it is spontaneous,
whereas written discourse is organized and
grammatical.
c. Spoken discourse contains more uncompleted
and reformulated sentences.
d. Topics can be changed.
e. Speakers may interrupt and overlap
 Rebuttal:
Spoken discourse is organized, but it is organized
differently from written discourse.

13. 7. Repetition, Hesitation, and Redundancy
 View:
b. Spoken discourse contains more
repetition, hesitations, and redundancy
because it is produced in real time (i.e. on
the spot).
c. Spoken discourse has many pauses and
fillers, such as ‘hhh’, ‘er’ and ‘you know’.
(See extract on p. 18)

14. II. A Continuum View
McCarthy (2001) argues for a continuum
view rather than simple, one-dimensional
difference between spoken and written
discourses.
In other words, differences are viewed as
being on a continuum:

15. A. Grammatical Complexity
Tightly packed
and integrated ---------------------------------------------------------------Fragmented

18. B. Detachment/inter-personal involvement
Detached-------------------------------------------------------------Interpersonally-
involved

19. Biber’s(1988) corpus-based study:
 No absolute difference between speech
and writing in English
There are dimensions of variation for
different kinds of texts (i.e. genres).
Considerable variation may occur even
within particular genres.