Speech v. Writing

Kate's post last week got me thinking about a lot of stuff, and coupled with part of a book I'm reading on self-organizing systems, I think there're some other relevant divisions in the goals of linguistics that need to be addressed. One that's gnawing at me is the distinction between spoken and written language. I don't think that there's a qualitative distinction in the underlying theory of how people construct sentences in the two modalities. But something's going on.

For instance, it's commonly agreed upon that spoken English is not always grammatical. People seeing transcripts often report that they surely did not say what was transcribed. And as any corpus linguist will tell you, spoken corpora are full of ungrammatical sentences. But what's interesting is that the spoken stuff seems to be locally coherent.

So here's my thought. Written stuff, thanks to the ability to see clearly what preceded the current point in the sentence, is based on global information. Spoken stuff, on the other hand, is based on what you can recall in a complicated setting where you're trying to formulate a novel thought in a stimulating environment with a reactive audience. In such situations, you should expect to have imperfect recall even of what specific words were at the start of your sentence. Rather, you could just remember the gist of what was said before and the last few spoken words, and assume that this is what your listener is doing as well. In that case, you can build the rest of your sentence based on local coherence with the recent words and the general sentence gist.

If that's how speaking and writing work, then it looks like we need different models for the grammars of the two modalities - one with rules/constraints that depend on pure global information, and the other with rules/constraints that depend almost solely on local information. This doesn't imply separate grammar types for written and spoken language, but rather a different set of constraints (or perhaps a different ranking of the same constraints, if you're particularly enamoured of OT). Alternatively, it may be that written English is subject to grammaticality judgments, and spoken English is subject to acceptability judgments, and that we're really honestly using different measures.

I don't know if this is totally the right direction, but I think the time will come (if it's not already here) when we need to address the differences in grammaticality judgments in written and spoken language.