A5. SPOKEN DISCOURSE
In many ways, speech is not so different from writing. When people speak they
also produce different kinds of genres (casual conversations, debates, lectures
and speeches of various kinds) and use different kinds of ‘social languages’.
They also promote particular versions of reality or ideologies.
But there are some ways in which speech is very different from writing:
1) Speech is more interactive: you speak to someone and receive feedbacks
which allows you to reformulate what you said. Conversations are always
co-constructed between or among the different parties having them.
2) Speech tends to be more transient and spontaneous than writing, we
can’t track back what we say, it is a fluid continuity of words as a result
of the interaction, and you can omit elements. When we write, we often
plan what we are going to write carefully, and we often read over, revise
and edit what we have written before showing it to other people. Because
writing has a certain ‘permanence’, people can also read what we have
written more carefully. On the other hand, casual conversation is just
made up as we go along, and our words disappear the moment we utter
them. This makes listening in some ways more challenging than reading.
3) Spoken discourse is less explicit than written discourse (writing: you
must specify a lot of things because who you address to doesn’t share
the same context as you). When we are speaking, we communicate with
our gaze, our gestures, our facial expressions and the tone of our voice.
When we are writing we do not have these tools and we often need to
depend more on the words themselves to express our meaning. Speech
also usually takes place in some kind of physical context which
participants share, and often the meaning of what we say is dependent
on this context.
People engaged in:
Telephone conversations (no visual feedback/gestures/facial expressions
to convey meaning) – skype calls (visual, share the context, facial
expressions which convey information about the speaker, multimodal
aspect)
Texting through FB or Messenger (mix between spoken and written
discourse, informal and everyday language)
Vocal messages
Spoken discourse is normally less explicit and more context dependent than
written discourse.
Interpreting what people mean
To interpret what people mean needs to go beyond the literal meanings of the
words.
Quite often in conversation people do not mean what they say and people do
not say what they mean.
