Spoken Grammar: why is it important? Michael McCarthy

Vulcan grammar why is it important that's a loaded question it means I already assumed it is important and I'm going to tell you why but I'm going to start with a bit of history we're here all of us thanks to Cambridge University Press which as you know is the oldest press in the world and when it was founded by King Henry the eighth at the time of King Henry the eighth's reign people were learning languages people in England usually rich people and usually men were learning Latin now there's a little schoolboys poem that says Latin

is a language as dead as dead can be it killed the ancient Romans and now it's killing me but at that time at the time of Henry the eighth Latin was quite a useful language you needed it to travel around Europe just as today you could say you need English to go to different countries at that time you needed Latin but you didn't need it to write you needed it to speak to people in France or Italy or Spain or Portugal and the young men of England would get on their horses get into their coaches

and do what was called the Grand Tour they would travel around Europe learning to be gentlemen and they would meet other gentlemen and they would speak to them in Latin what they learnt in their schools in England was actually spoken Latin they learned spoken grammar and in Cambridge University Library we have these original text books they were called Vulgaria and if you know Latin you will know that Vulgaria means ordinary things the things of the common people and the language which these textbooks taught was the language of the common people the Volga Volga has a

much more negative meaning in modern English but its original meaning simply means the people so they were learning Latin learning to speak Latin not to write it and learning the language of the ordinary people then everything changed science came in and the language of science was also Latin but it was a language for writing and it became so important as the language of thought language of intellectual pursuit that the spoken grammars died and for several centuries grammars of English and grammars of Latin were all based upon the written language and that situation persisted right down

the centuries until shall we say the end of the last century the end of the 20th century then it changed and there are good reasons why things changed and why I'm here today able to talk about spoken grammar without feeling embarrassed without feeling I'm talking about a suspicious subject a subject that we only mention in whispers and of course two things changed one was the advent of sound recording technology and not just the ability to record sound but to do it on very small pieces of equipment Walkman little digital recorders small microphones like this one

so for the first time we were able to capture the language of the ordinary people not the language of the auratus the winston churchill's or the Martin Luther King's the language of ordinary people doing ordinary things having dinner cooking dinner traveling in a car chatting to their colleagues of work chatting to other students in their halls of residence we were able to capture these voices the other major change was the advent of computers and software which could analyze the spoken language now I'm not talking today about the phonetic aspects of spoken language I'm talking about

spoken language which has been transcribed faithfully and stored in a computer as a corpus corpus is just a collection of texts stored in the computer so if for example I wanted to find out as much as possible about a language like Italian a good idea would be to take all the newspapers published in Italy for a whole year and put that text into a computer this would be my corpus plural corpora okay from the Latin corpus meaning a body not to be confused with corpse which is a dead body okay so I'm going to be

talking about corpora and I'm going to be talking about how a corpus can help us understand everyday ordinary vulgar spoken language and I'm saying vulgar in that traditional sense of the word then I'll talk about whether we should teach this how important it is and how we might go about teaching it now Rupert Daniel's kindly introduced me as a professor so I suppose I'm an academic I have to start off by looking at the literature on spoken language so we're going to jump 500 years from the time of King Henry to the time of the

present Queen Elizabeth and with a bit of luck we'll see if this works there we go we'll see some of the discussions about spoken grammar that have taken place in the last 20 years or so I choose 20 years because it is in fact more or less exactly 20 years little bit more since my colleague Ronald Carter and I published two articles about spoken grammar innocent little academic articles which caused an explosion of rage and outrage in the academic community you would have thought we were advocating committing some horrendous crime the reaction that we got

and it took a long time for the dust to settle as we say in the literature myself and my colleague Ronald Carter in 1995 pointed out that there were bits of grammar in everyday conversation that were quite different or sometimes absent from the grammar of writing okay so we were looking at speaking everyday speaking and we were finding pieces of grammar that were either absent from writing or which were just not very common in writing Douglas Biber and his colleagues at the University of Flagstaff northern Arizona sorry the University of northern Arizona at Flagstaff published

a wonderful grammar in 1999 big grammar with another publisher whose name we dare not mentioned in this Cambridge conference differences of distribution and function of grammatical items that what they did was they took four types of language they took fiction novels and short stories they took newspapers they took academic writing and they took everyday conversation and they found there were quite significant differences Judd the late great grammarian Jeffrey leach who sadly died two years ago in the year 2000 pointed out that conversation was different from writing because it is produced online in real time it

is linear when we construct our speaking we're not thinking ah now I need a subordinate clause which I will embed in a main clause and I'll probably have an Advil feel free in there somewhere oh yes that will go in them that has to go in that place there and of course this results in quite short utterances if you look at a corpus of conversation you do not find well-formed sentences like those which I'm speaking now most people just grunt yeah to come oh okay right see you then yeah yeah there's a lot of that

Christophe ruler man in Germany a up-and-coming brilliant younger linguist I say young he's probably about 50 but to me Christophe ruler man in 2007 said conversation is where we find the most outstanding differences between speaking and writing so if we want to look at the grammar of speaking we don't look at what I'm doing now a formal lecture where you find the really important differences is in everyday conversation now I'm going to look at some key features of spoken grammar in the time that remains to me I've just tow it chosen three I'm going to

talk about co-construction the strategic use of tenses and something called situational ellipsis now if these are terms that you're not familiar with doesn't matter I hope they will become clear in the next 20 minutes or so let's start with co-construction co-construction simply means doing things together okay it doesn't mean bricks and mortar and making buildings student says well so I have no lectures I have to do the research myself he's talking about writing a dissertation or a lesson you have to do it yourself says the other student and the first student says which is harder

like and a third student comes in and says which would be very difficult I'd say and the first student says yeah now what is interesting here is we have all the appearances of some good sentences you know you have a main clause and you have these clauses with which yeah they are subordinate clauses they are WH clauses they are these classic which non-defining relative or comment clauses as they're called in writing what always fascinates me is number one these are very common number two they're often spoken by the same person number three they're often spoken

by a different person number four nobody ever says you stay out of my sentence you make your own sentences who do you think you are hanging of which subordinate clause on to my main board that's my clause you are not engaged in a monologue when you're in conversation it's not oh it's my turn right my monologue now it's your mother though now it's her monologue we create the whole thing together we do it with which we can also do it with it we could go to the beach tomorrow says one now the poster says if

the weather's fine yeah so you have a classic conditional sentence created by two people here we have a nice setters with which Clause is created by three people it is so ordinary so common so vulgar in the best sense of the word why is it important then why should we get excited about this well it's important because it facilitates the following things interpersonal bonding that's what conversation is about it is a social action with which one human being bonds with another it enables the negotiation of meaning meaning isn't something that's established beforehand you have to

work out what is this person trying to say to me what am I trying to say to him or her we negotiated but perhaps most important for us as language teachers it enables what I call flow it enables the conversation to flow this is an important element of fluency the ability to hook your clause onto the previous speaker there's a good deal of research to support that research outside of our profession research in sociology which shows that perceptions of fluency have an important role in how we judge other people in a job interview some sociology

research has shown that if you are heard if you are perceived as fluent you will get a better job so these things are quite fundamentally important they are not just academic abstract things they are the meat and drink of everyday language okay how do you present this kind of thing well you have to go beyond the normal sort of grammar chart you can't just say yeah this is how you form a which clause we know that we teach that you have to show in a conversational context you have to illustrate it your students are not

going to come into class next Monday and say teacher can you teach us how to attach subordinate clauses on to the other person speaking term you've been very lucky you'd have wonderful students if they said that yeah come on you must know it you know how do I use a which clause to attach to the other person's speech so that I sound fluent I didn't wake up one morning myself realizing how important these were the computer brought them up for me from the corpus the computer said this is a very common way of using the

word which so then of course there is a comprehension phase what are these things mean you have to help students notice these things it's question of observation you see your students don't have a corpus they don't have a that they're not going to go and search some big corpus with a computer what we want them to do is to wake up and notice things that happen in ordinary conversation find more examples in the conversation here's a conversation from a well-known textbook this is a typical conversation of Ana and Pedro and Ana says did you see

that video clip I emailed you no I don't generally tend to watch them which is unusual I guess what was it oh it's a couple of talking cats it's hilarious yeah I don't mind the funny ones you know what I don't like people do really dangerous things and video it's like riding bikes off walls which is stupid I know so you can see this is typical conversation that you get in the corpus we take our conversations from the corpus we adapt them we remove some of the more incomprehensible bits and in it we have some

of these typical which clauses the first one is spoken by petr insult the second one is spoken by another speaker and then we have another one down there so there they are they're not unusual but we don't notice them in everyday conversation I hope when you leave here you will start to notice them because they are very very common this is not unusual grammar it always scares me when I go to conferences and people say oh well have you written anything for the advanced level and I say yes I have you know Cambridge has published

advanced materials that I've written again I won't mention them but Sir you know from my own viewpoint and I always say yes yes have a look at this and they look at loose and they're searching through and you say can I help you and they say yes I'm looking for the subjunctive oh yes yes yes some people won't buy it if it doesn't have the subjunctive in I didn't even know English had a subjunctive it does but it's very rare it's extremely rare of course then we want to once we raise this awareness this noticing

we need to practice things and it's important our philosophy is practice within the students language abilities you want them to practice this which this co-construction feature so don't make it terribly terribly difficult by saying have a discussion about deep-sea thermal ventral apertures under the ocean you know it's got to be something that's within their abilities that he relevant and familiar activity type you don't need a new type of activity to teach what is effectively a very old piece of grammar topics that are easy to talk about supporting examples of what people really do say and

that's why we need the corpus it's very difficult to know what you've said it's very easy to know what you write I remember when I started as an English teacher I was in that wonderful position of being the native speaker at the school in Spain people would say ask him you know and they would come to me and they would say Mike you know which is correct over the other and I would say he let me think and that was dangerous let me think because the moment I would say let me think what was I

thinking about I was thinking about how I write or how my what my grammar teacher taught me at school what is really difficult is to know what you say there's plenty of research that shows that neither native speakers nor expert users of English know what they say okay I've been at conferences and I've said right the most frequent two-word phrase in speaking in English is you know okay and I say in a corpus of five million words there are twelve thousand examples of you know but it's one of the most important phrases in the language

and then in the question and answer sessions afterwards it's always someone who says yes but this is not good English I don't want to teach my students things like you know I want to teach them proper English you know they always do it okay so we don't know how we speak and research shows that we don't know we it is very difficult to be objective about something that is linear real-time online live temporary disappears into the air you need to record it you need to analyze it now the computer is dispassionate the computer has no

prejudices about the language the computer doesn't say ha this is common but be careful it's it's you know it's not very good English the computer simply says this is what you say and this is how many times you say it's up to you then to decide what to do with that information and of course last but not least there is no point in teaching these spoken grammar features unless you make it possible for the students to personalize and relate it to their own lives and the practice should be as practice it's not a test because

what's the point in testing it when it's not part of their normal grammar learning in that sense the practice phase leads into what we then call induction which is where the student works out in his or her own mind what the principle or rule is behind the activity now in this case it's grammar with a difference it's not grammar as rules you know a rule would be we use which for things and who for persons that's a rule this is nothing to do with rules this is what my colleague Ronald Carter and I call the

grammar of choice it is a choice which you make in order to create better interaction you don't have to say which is difficult which must be difficult you can say it must be difficult perfectly correct but not as fluent not as interactive as saying which must be difficult yeah if you say to me I have to work I have to travel 30 miles to work every day which must be really tiring that is interactive it flows I have to travel to work 30 miles every day it must be tiring it's correct it's not quite as

fluent as the other version okay that's our look let's see get some little practice things here you just have to match the left and right do you email video clips to your friends all the time no it's a pain I have a friend who's always sending clips which is really annoying so I take an apple over there I'll only send one if it's really interesting or funny which is fine okay so that's gone they've gone from the box over to there let's move on to the next of our three points that is the use of

the tense and aspect system now by tense I mean references to time English just has two tenses present and past English has no future perhaps in more ways than one English has no conditional we have to make them up we have to paraphrase them using words like will and going to not like Spanish or French or other European languages which have nice future tenses and conditional tenses what English does have of course is several aspects aspects we distinguish between simple and continuous perfect and non perfect yes so those are examples of aspect tenses are about

time aspects are about the speaker's perspective on time alright they are your perspective your subjective interpretation of time that's why it's possible to say I feel well and it's equally possible to say I'm feeling well they're both perfectly correct the only difference is your perspective whether you're looking at it from the outside I feel well or you feel you're in the middle of something that's a process I'm feeling well okay we're going to give you some examples again from the corpus this is in a travel agents they're a dying breed now aren't they travel agents

but when we made this recording people still went to travel agents to book their holidays and this person says we were wanting to book a trip to Sardinians and the travel agent didn't say oh well I'm sorry you've changed your mind bug I past-tense we were wanting I took this jacket to the cleaners and I put it down on the counter and I said I'd like to have this clean please and the assistant said yeah what was the name and I said well same as it's always been a habit chair and here's another one Sally

was telling me they're moving to berming there are hundreds of these in our corpus we were wanting why not say we want we want to book a holiday Sardinia perfectly correct of course you have two choices you when you have three choices you can say we want to book a holiday we wanted to book a holiday or we are wanting or even were wanting so it's actually four choices it's like that Monty Python sketch about this Spanish Inquisition they keep adding more every time so they're at least four possibilities for asking this question of giving

this information this is two steps away from in your face we want to book a holiday to Sardinia we wanted a little bit more Disney we were wanting even more distant why do you want to be distant because you're asking somebody for a service for a favor and you want a good relationship with that person you want them to help you you want actually to bond interactively with them in some way what was the name again it's a polite form now the third one Sally was telling me we're moving to Birmingham this one fascinated me

because there were literally hundreds of these in our corpus and then I looked at the books I'd written in the past in the section about reported speech where we said the rule is this Sally says we're moving to Birmingham and you have to change it to Sally said or Sally told me they were moving to Birmingham but the computer says that what people say hundreds of times is not Sally told me or Sally said but Sally was saying Sally was telling me I was reading in the paper the other day past continuous form to report

things that people say or things that people write you don't find it in newspapers you don't find the Prime Minister was saying in Parliament the other day that they're going to raise taxes it's always the Prime Minister said the Prime Minister declared the Prime Minister stated because it is completely absent from writing for decades it was absent from all the grammar books and all the course books you look at them you look at your course books with one exception of course you look at your course books and you will see that this very very common

form is just not there it's not in some of the big grammars of English those which were published before 2006 I mean when Cambridge published the Cambridge grammar of English and really these forms were omitted forgotten because they are part of the grammar of speaking and what we find is they always preface something interesting something newsworthy a new topic it's a way of saying listen up okay it's not a way of saying I have a report to make to you of something that somebody said it is a way of saying here's some news here's something

I want you to listen to here's a new topic and so it is a signal of topic management it is a signal to you the listener I've got something interesting to tell you not just English I know it happens in Spanish Sally made seok da da da da da the thing with phrases like Sally was telling me I was reading in the paper the other day is that you really should not be sitting there thinking ah I've got a piece of news I'd better choose the past continuous before I tell her now how's the past

continuous I was was they'll have read no that's present perfect these have to be automatic immediate they're little signals they're little chunks they are effectively grammatical chunks we don't process them and invent them each time they're just chunks here's some more examples of them I was wondering I was wondering if I was wondering if you could I wanted to would it be all right it would it be okay with you these little things like would it be all right the conditional use there I was wondering the past continuous it's perfectly correct to say I wonder

but if you can get these little chunks into your head their little preface --is to what you want to see so we treat these as what I call lexical grammar they are partly treated like big words lexis and partly as grammar they're important because they facilitate politeness and in directness we don't like to be in one another's face every language I've ever looked at in my life has ways of being indirect it is a stupid myth to think that this is some character of the English that they cannot be direct creates good relations whether it's

in a shop or whether it's with your colleagues at work or your friends and it expresses your perspective on reality your perspective on the situation and so finished with looking at situational ellipsis ah someone's changed that too situated ellipsis it should say situation ellipsis anyway and there are a couple of references especially another misprint I'm afraid it should became some buttery bu TT er why Andrew Keynes and Paula buttery of this very University Brij University have done some wonderful work on this in conversation ready yet you're talking to me hammer please now this last one

I like because it's a recording of people doing a do-it-yourself job you know that they're repairing or putting something together and the one person says the other hammer please and the next thing that happens is the person gives them the hammer she doesn't hit him over the head with the hammer right she gives him the hammer so how does she know that what he wants is to be given the hammer well of course it's obvious in this situation conversations take place in situations it seems obvious to say that doesn't it it seems very obvious but

it is true conversations take place in situations and we only say what we need to say no more if you say more people hear you as pedantic but would you be so kind as to pass me the hammer please husband - wife wife - husband if my wife said that to me I begin to think she didn't love me anymore would you be so kind as to pass me the hammer please don't say what's wrong with you what have I done now so these things are deeply meaningful we say only what we need to say

now this is a quite a revolutionary thing to conclude because traditionally if you look at the traditional definitions of ellipsis which is what this is called ellipsis it means leaving out omitting things which should be there but nothing is missing from here something missing if I say to the other person hammer please the other person doesn't say what do you mean hammer please yeah might you want me to hit you over the head with a hammer or water you want me to go and buy a hammer do you think I look like a hammer of

course not nothing is missing nothing is omitted from any of these messages what we do when the situation is not obvious is of course we add things we elaborate that's why writing is more elaborate than conversation it's very simple because written texts are written to be read and consumed usually in a different place in a different time when a written text is meant to be read in situation then it's just like conversation you can go around Cambridge and see our walls no bicycles okay no bicycles and everybody in Cambridge knows what that means it means

don't park your bicycle here however I passed the place the other day which rents bicycles to students and there was a sign outside which said no bicycles and I realised that it meant we have rented them all out we don't have any left don't bother coming to ask us they're all gone okay so these you interpret things in the situation you only say or write what you need to say of course you do this all the time there are some rules and principles you can't run into room saying oh I late doesn't work so there

are some underlying principles only the compass can tell us when this happens and how it happens we can write a grammar of ellipsis but we need the evidence from our corpus here's a conversation that that's two people putting up a shelf do you need this screwdriver here it is thanks I can't get this shelf off the wall do you want me to try getting it off for you yes thanks are you sure you've got time yes okay that's done do you need help with anything else thank you no there's nothing else would you like a

drink I'd love one have you got any green tea it sounds like a conversation you'd have with the Queen in Buckingham Palace you're helping the Queen to put up her book show now what we can do with this when we've introduced the notion of ellipsis is say instead of the usual type of activity of add an adverb after the verb or put in the missing preposition this is the opposite we're going to say what can you take away from this and it's still good English well you could get rid of that good we need the

screwdriver here it is Thanks can't get the shelf off the wall want me to try getting it off for you the song you can have fun looking at what you can leave out not just what you must put in nice nice for a friendly little exercise and it gives you that flavour of naturalness of natural conversation and so on situational ellipsis is important because it facilitates this context embedded situationally determine the interaction it's what we do when we're doing things whether it's cooking or putting up a shelf or driving your car or fixing up the

projector here classically it's what it's a type of language that linguists have called language in action okay that's the names of this type of language language in action where the activities and actions that people are doing determine how they use the language it's informal yeah so don't go to a job interview and the interviewer says do tell me about your past career well worked in McDonald's for ten years didn't like it got bored okay so you don't you know it is appropriate to informal close friendship situations it's economical its grammar it's easy grammar you know

we're always insisting that our students produce these beautiful well-formed sentences most of conversation doesn't contain sentences at all it contains utterances that are strong together so where are we now there is never greater acceptance of the notion of spoken grammar SG in applied linguistics in general a lot of the arguments have happened in the 90s and the controversies have settled down there are now numerous descriptive articles on spoken grammar which add much more to what I've talked about today there is a strong influence in reference grammars I'm very proud of my own grammar the Cambridge

grammar of English published in 2006 special price today of two for the two for the price of three spoken grammar also brings with it a much better acceptance of diversity and variety some variation in language there is no one correct formal standard of spoken ground it respects and admires and actually encourages diversity and difference growing influencing course books which I've already touched on growing importance now a multi-modal corporate if you were if you want to understand the language of two people putting a shelf up have a video two people putting a shelf up so this

is why video is incredibly useful and of course recent technologies are really destroying this divide between spoke and grammar and written grammar what we can call egranary the grammar of online communication whether it be blogs or fora or emails or text messaging they are much more like spoken grammar than they are like written grammar so the future lies in spoken grammar just as the past 500 years ago did thank you very much