Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy

As discourse analysis has turned linguistic attention to texts, it is crucial to understand the relationship between various kinds of texts. Spoken vs. written modes constitute one of the basic distinguishing characteristics of texts and is a natural stepping-off point for such an inquiry. Furthermore, all the issues of applied linguisticshow language affects and is used in everyday interaction, education, and various special settingswill be enlightened by an understanding of 1) the relationship of spoken to written language, and 2) how language attitudes and conventions associated with orality and literacy influence discourse.

This volume addresses these issues of discourse analysis and embodies two crucial features that have characterized much recent work in this area. It is broadly interdisciplinary, including research in anthropology, psychology, and literature as well as linguistics, which is at the core. And it is deeply humanistic, looking at language always in context and as a human endeavor.

The authors of these collected papers demonstrate that complexities found in discourse in context reflect not only its spoken or written mode but its interactive goals and structures: genre, register, and speech event all play significant roles. A number of the chapters consider the relationship of literary to conversational language and find them closer, and distinctions between them foggier, than had previously been thought. Finally, we have a view of individuals and societies caught in changing traditions of orality and literacy intertwined with each other and with chirography, print, and technology.

Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She has published twenty books and over 100 articles on such topics as family discourse, spoken and written language, cross-cultural communication, modern Greek discourse, the poetics of everyday conversation, the relationship between conversational and literary discourse, gender and language, workplace interaction, agonism in public discourse, and doctor-patient communication.