Grammar as she is spoke.

• Author: Carter, Ronald
• Position: WORDS IMAGES - Column

HOW DO YOU WRITE your e-mails? Do you write blackberry? In other words, do you write like you speak? Naked Chef author Jamie Oliver and broadcast journalist Jeremy Clarkson do it--and with great success. Dictionaries and grammars always have taken the written language as a benchmark for what is proper and standard. The spoken language has been downgraded, as what is written and what is literate has higher cultural status. Our language, though, is changing. People are beginning to write more like they speak.

Recent advances in audio and recording technologies mean that there now are collections of people speaking in both formal and informal situations. The Cambridge International Corpus, developed by Cambridge University Press, contains more than 1,000,000,000 words of English with several million words of spoken English.

These examples are collected in everyday places such as shops, pubs, the workplace, and family home. The people recorded in the Corpus come from different regions of the country and incorporate a range of ages, social classes, and gender. These recordings then are transcribed and made computer-readable so that computer programs can identify frequent patterns and changes in the language.

The Corpus also has plenty of examples of e-mails, magazines, newspapers, texting, and advertisements that show how the spoken and written varieties of English are more closely connected than we might have thought For instance, we are becoming very vague in the way we speak (and write). We all use a lot of vague language, including words and phrases such as thing, stuff, or so, or something, and sort of. Vague language avoids information overload and involves the reader. For example: "He was talking about sport, Wimbledon, the World Cup, U.S. Open Golf and that sort of stuff." (Observer Magazine). Here are some common examples of spoken grammar:

* There are forms that are termed heads, found at the beginning of clauses. They help listeners orient to the topic: The white house on the comer, is that where she lives?

* There are forms that are termed tails, found at the end of clauses. They help to reinforce what we are saying: I'm going to have steak and fries, I am.

* Spoken ellipsis occurs when we omit subjects and verbs because we can assume our listeners know what we mean: Sounds good to me (instead of: That sounds good to me).

* When quoting someone especially, it is important to signify an ellipsis with a series of three evenly spaced...