Differences between spoken and written English: The case of the predicative prepositional phrases in the ICE-GB

Abstract

This paper is aimed at describing the main differences between spoken and written English. More specifically, attention is paid to the different examples which are classified as predicative Prepositional Phrases (PPs) in the International Corpus of English-­Great Britain (ICE-­GB) and their frequency in spoken and written texts. These units can be defined as those phrases which are introduced by a preposition and followed by a Noun Phrase (NP) acting as its complement. Furthermore, they perform the function of Subject Complement (Cs) at clause level. Such is the case of “She first fell in love with Will when she was eighteen, and she adores him still” (ICE­‐GB:W2F­‐019#47:1). Although in terms of frequency this is not the syntactic function PPs more often perform, they are taken into account because of their complexity and due to the lack of detailed analyses. In most cases they are described as isolated examples and this phenomenon is not considered to be a very productive one. After introducing some basic notions, these structures are analyzed focusing on their presence in both spoken and oral texts within the ICE-GB. This is a one-million-word corpus which is both morphologically tagged and syntactically parsed. Moreover, it was compiled in the nineties and consists of both spoken (60%) and written material (40%). The ICECUP (ICE Corpus Utility Program) software retrieved 3307 examples from 3223 sentences. These instances were then filtered since some of them were later classified as “noise” (in some cases the PPs were performing other functions either at phrase or at clause level and in others the element acting as the complement of the preposition was not a NP). For these reasons the final subcorpus consists of 1332 examples. 67.49% of these instances (899) are found in oral texts whereas 32.51% of them (433) belong to written texts. All these examples have been classified into different groups and subgroups corresponding to the different text categories available in this corpus (Nelson, Wallis and Aarts, 2002: 307-8). The results are presented in charts by means of both figures and percentages and different conclusions are later drawn based on the analysis of these charts. Thus, for example, it can be noticed that, although it was expected that the amount of structures under study would be higher in spoken than in written texts because of the structure of the corpus itself, the relative frequency (which takes into account the relationship between the number of examples and the number of words) proves so, too: 0.1410% in spoken texts as opposed to 0.1022% in written texts, with an average of 0.1255% in the whole corpus. Moreover, there are more examples in dialogues (581) than in monologues (318) and in printed texts (332) than in non-printed ones (101). This information proves especially relevant for non-native speakers of English since it allows them to become aware of the differences between speaking and writing. According to the evidence, some units are used more often in spoken language than in written English. Therefore, when producing any kind of text, students will feel more confident for they will be able to choose the appropriate structures bearing in mind these issues.