Introducing English Linguistics

few minutes talking about the climate system
and uh then having
sort of looked at that we’ll ask the question and hopefully answer it
The social context of English
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uh why observe from space. There are many parts of the climate system
that we could discuss uhm but uh I thought I would concentrate on
polar ice, and any of you who saw ITV’s News at Ten last night uh will
have will have a foretaste of at least one of the things that I uh will
address. And then I’ll say a few words about where do we go next, uh
what’s going to happen in the future. So we’ll start with what is the
climate system.
(ICE-GB S2A-043 009)
The speaker so explicitly tells her audience what she will discuss because
she knows that the people to whom she is speaking do not have a written
text at hand to refer to, and she wants to provide them with a global
framework for her talk so that they will be able to anticipate what she will
be discussing.
In other contexts, such signposting is unnecessary. It would be odd to
begin a spontaneous dialogue with statements such as “First, I’m going to
discuss the weather and then my visit with my father” because, as men-
tioned earlier, such dialogues have a fairly loose organizational structure.
In many kinds of written texts, it is considered bad style to include com-
mentary such as “In this paper, I will ...” because it is expected of authors
that they organize what they say in a less heavy-handed manner: what
they write should be implicitly well organized and not require construc-
tions that reveal the structure.
While the previous examples focus on the maxim of manner as it
applies to entire discourses, it applies to single utterances as well. Much
prescriptive advice about writing focuses on telling writers how to write
clear sentences. Kirkman (1992: 50) advises writers to avoid “excessive
‘nominalization’ – excessive use of ‘noun-centered’ structures ... [and to
instead use] A crisper, ‘verb-centred’ style ...” Thus, he argues that the first
example below, which contains three nominalizations (functions, allocat-
ing, and apportioning) as well as a verb in the passive voice (are performed),
is much less clear than the second example, which is in the active voice
and contains verbal equivalents (allocates and  apportions) of two of the
nominalizations in the first example:
The functions of allocating and apportioning revenue are performed by
the ABC.
The ABC allocates and apportions the revenue.
While Kirkman’s (1992) advice might seem purely prescriptive, Hake and
Williams (1981: 445–6) describe psycholinguistic research and an experi-
ment they gave that suggests that the nominal style is much more difficult
to process than the verbal style. However, Hake and Williams (1981) also
report that in certain contexts, readers will judge essays written in the
nominal style as “better” writing than equivalent essays written in the ver-
bal style. Consequently, clarity of expression is often valued less than the
high level of abstraction associated with the nominal style, which many
associate with intellectual maturity. This contradiction calls into question
just how consistently speakers adhere to the maxim of manner.
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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