Speaking of Writing and Writing of Speaking

Katie Wales

 BRIDGING THE GAP

It is often said that there is a gap between speech/speaking and writing, and indeed there is, as David Crystal emphasises in the first edition of the Longman Language Review. We know that there are varieties of English that eve associate primarily with the spoken medium, and those primarily with the written (e.g. the representative collection of conversations in the British National Corpus, versus Mills and Boon novels or product packaging). There are, as a result, as David Crystal also stresses, certain grammatical and lexical features we associate primarily with speech, and those with writing; and certain prosodic features that are not easily accommodated in writing; and certain graphological features not easily pronounced in speech.

Grammar books and dictionaries for EFL use certainly try to advise students on such differences, sometimes incorporating a style distinction: speech is assumed to be generally 'informal', and writing 'formal'. Interestingly, one of the innovations of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English is also to distinguish between spoken and informal English. For example, an informal word like clobber (meaning clothes or possessions) is quite frequent in written English.

In fact, any word can be written down, but the dictionary marks as spoken words or phrases that are shown to be more frequent in speech in the spoken corpora that Longman used in the preparation of the dictionary. One such phrase is That's life!, which is obviously more typical of speech but more of purely spoken English in a later issue of the Longman Language Review.

However, the distinctions both in medium and style can be blurred. There is formal speaking (as in the debates and lectures found in the British National Corpus) and informal writing (as in the memos and letters of the BNC). And there are 'mixed' genres or media, as David Crystal also indicates. So writing may be read aloud (as in the TV scripts for the Captain Pugwash series in the BNC), or speech may be written down, as in statements to the police.

My main focus in this article is precisely how the gap between speech and writing may be blurred, but in a rather less obvious way than is often discussed.

 NEWS AS SPEECH

News reporting was once oral/spoken ("Have you heard the news?" "Have I got news for you" "It's news to me"), and of course still is to some extent, although the news read out on radio and TV is from carefully prepared written scripts. But in oral/spoken terms, news is but one of a number of related varieties of 'storytelling': including the colloquial sense of gossip and rumour. We tend to assume that NEWS IS TRUTH not FICTION (unless we are reading headlines in the Sunday Sport such as 'Freddie Star Ate Hamster').

We also assume that DIRECT SPEECH/ QUOTATION is TRUTH: hence its considerable use in advertising, for example, as a means of verification or a seal of approval' of the value of a product or service. So we find examples like:

We tend to assume that Mr King is a real person, a satisfied client; however, consider this example taken from an advert for Lloyd's Bowmaker Homeowner Loans:

This forms the 'headline' to the advert, with no speaker attribution. This looks like a 'stayed' or 'symbolic' representative view of Joe or Jane Public, comparable to the use of professional actors or models in TV advertising. But the use of direct speech suggests an authenticity.

Quite a lot of news reports in the press are actually of acts of speaking. We tend to assume that NEWS is FACTS (cf. Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture: 'facts...about a recent event or events'). But NEWS is also SPEECH: what has been said, rather than what has happened. So news reporting 'reports' or 'represents' speech in the same way that novelists do. There is a parallel here with creative writing, as we shall see further.

 HEADLINE NEWS

In terms of actual speech acts and events we are bombarded daily in the news with reports of congresses, bargaining, forecasts, quarrels, etc. Such speech acts can in headlines be reported simply by a speech act verb:

In this last example, verbal and physical action work together. Predict in the first example is a verb most likely to occur in financial contexts such as this (or weather forecasting). In some cases, the speech act is 'embedded' in a verbal noun:

As Caldas-Coulthard (1994) indicates, the verb scary is probably the most frequently used speech report verb in journalism generally, and the most 'neutral'; but other related verbs tend to occur regularly in newspaper headlines (similarly monosyllabic, for brevity), often with particular connotations which are significant in the manipulation of the reader's point of view (e.g. admit, bid, bet, claim). Verbs like urge and incite (with particular kinds of collocates) seem to appear significantly in political journalism. Investigation of different kinds of discourse in the British National Corpus helps us to refine such discourse groupings and motivations for use.

Speech events can themselves be more directly quoted in headlines, but with varying degrees of direct speech marking. Different ways of representing speech have been well discussed by stylisticians for fiction, and it is often assumed that the same conventions apply to journalism and headlines. This is not actually the case, as I hope to show here.

 CONVENTIONS OF REPRESENTATION

One common device in both tabloid and 'quality' press headlines is to mark the verb phrase, as in:

In such examples, there is an interesting mix of factual statement blended with what is someone's opinion or report. Take away the speech marks, and it would be a fact presented as news/the truth. We can note that the quotation marks in each case also graphically mark out what is essentially the 'focus' of information, the most important part.

 DIFFERENT NUANCES

Sometimes such partial quotation has a different nuance, to suggest a theory or view held by someone, but not necessarily by the newspaper itself:

Such a device and function allows a useful distancing sometimes, and avoids the ever present threat of libel. It is comparable to the use of the adverb allegedly on the TV programme Have I Got News For You.

Another common convention is to have a statement which appears to be the representation of actual speech, although there are no speech marks (a fact to which I shall return), combined with a parenthetical clause with a speech act verb (usually say), as in:

Superficially, this looks like what stylisticians of the novel would term 'direct speech': we can note the reporting clause, and the use of features of 'direct' quotation, such as imperative (let) and colloquialism (kids). But note also the subject of the verb say in each case: a collective or plural noun phrase (engineers, reform group, bookies). Unless we assume that they all spoke in unison like a Greek Chorus, which is unlikely, it is clear that what is 'quoted', apparently directly, is but a collective or summative opinion of several individuals: exactly what happens in so called 'reported' or 'indirect' speech. This convention, then, is exactly that. In reported speech there is no obligation to report the exact words verbatim, and hence 'truthfully'.

In this respect, the examples in 6. are similar to another conventional structure peculiar to journalism, namely that illustrated in:

The by-phrase 'tag' appears to be borrowed from the register of book-titling; but the text before the attribution is again really a report or summary of what is said: these words may or may not have been actually used.

 QUOTATION MARKS

The absence of quotation marks in 6. is worth further consideration. For stylisticians like Leech and Short (1981), the sentences in 6. would not simply be direct speech, but 'free' direct speech, but still with the implication that the actual words have been faithfully recorded: 'free' in that sense from interference. This is not actually the case in newspaper headlines, as Short himself has subsequently decided (1988:75). In another category of representation lack of speech marks can again be noted, and superficially the sentences are sometimes indistinguishable from statements of fact: e.g.

Headline (i) appears to be a fact, but when we read the actual article we find that it is really a speech summary or report of what a psychologist has opined, whose remarks are also quoted. Hence the FACT/REPORT (BELIEF) distinction is truly blurred here. Examples (ii), (iii) and (iv) are different in that they contain features associated with direct speech, such as imperative (put down), deictics (that, this), 1st person pronouns and contracted verb (I'll, my) and colloquialisms (loot, laddie, 'andy). We must read the respective articles to identify the supposed speakers; but in no case can we assume that these words were actually the words used. Fear of libel may be one reason why using direct speech marks is not apparently usual. Such headlines have the vivid and dramatic impact of direct speech, without its commitment to veracity.

 POETIC LICENCE

Example 8. (iii) is also particularly interesting for another reason, namely its alliteration (loot, laddie). Is this accidental? I think not. Like speech evocation itself, it is an ear catching (and also eye catching) device, and hence a kind of 'poetic licence' incompatible with accuracy of report. 8. (iv) illustrates this licence very clearly, with its pun on handy/Andy. Since linguistic creativity is markedly characteristic of headline writing, it is not to be expected that represented speech is immune from it.

'REAL' SPEECH So what happens when quotation marks are actually used? Is this 'real' speech? Consider this example:

The article describes how an army officer rang his wife from Bosnia to tell her he had married someone else. The quotation marks are doubly significant, in that they mark not only direct speech, but a telephone conversation (marked also by the opening formula, Hello dear). So far so good: but wed? Apart from the marriage ceremony (with this ring, I thee wed') this word is spoken in northern varieties of English and seldom, if ever, appears outside the written medium of journalism. Not surprisingly, we may then doubt the authenticity of sex maniac and the alliterative Bosnian beauty.

 CONCLUSION: CLOSING THE GAP

In sum, journalists borrow the stereotypical features associated with direct speech and spoken registers, but mix and blend them with features of their own genre to produce a pseudo direct speech that is not authentic or truthful in the strictest sense. The only obligation is to report that a speech act or event has actually taken place. Perhaps we as readers do not worry about accuracy and rather enjoy the word play; but undoubtedly, this pseudo direct speech is symptomatic of what Caldas-Coulthard ( 1994) notes generally, namely the blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction in journalism, with more worrying implications.

There is certainly no denying the power of apparent quotation. Indeed, one particular kind of newsworthy story, the report released by firms to the press via news agencies, is frequently structured according to an apparent press 'conference'. This may actually have been Staged' in the process of composition, like a drama or play. The use of dialogue and direct speech lends drama, vividness and personality to the impersonal company, and 'legitimizes' it. And so we are back to advertising where I began, and the creative use and manipulation of apparent direct speech in the interests of verification: 'selling a company like 'selling' a product.

By the manipulation of speech in writing the media close the gap between the two kinds of discourse. They also blur the distinction between truth and fiction.

 NOTE

This article is based on a presentation at the Longman ELT Seminar at the English Speaking Union on February Ist, 1995.

 REFERENCES

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