Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

INTRODUCTION

104

Spoken interaction may range from being intimate and informal to being formal

and distant. Often the distance between speakers is dictated by social factors such

as interpersonal relationship, the setting or the respective power and social status

of the participants. 

There is a variety of grammatical options open to speakers to mark intimacy or

distance. These range from different formulaic greetings and farewells to the ways

in which people address or name one another, or the way they use clause types or

tense and aspect choices to show degrees of politeness. Writers typically cannot

see who they are speaking to and often have to ‘project’ an ideal reader for their

purposes (e.g. typical educated reader of novels, or typical teenage magazine

reader). 

The more dynamic and face-to-face nature of spoken communication also

means that speakers have to choose the best ways to organise and sequence their

messages for the benefit of their listeners and in collaboration with them. This

involves ‘marking’ the discourse, signalling for the listener what is happening

using the discourse-marking resources of the language. 

Speakers also express stances, attitudes and feelings towards their messages

and reactions to what others say, all in real-time face-to-face interaction, with

listeners’ sensitivities in mind. Spoken grammar therefore also has important

affective features. 

Speakers choose how to address others. For example, when do speakers use sir

or madam? When do they address people directly by name?

This chapter looks at some of these central social, contextual and affective

functions of grammar and spoken English. Sections 105–113 are concerned with

the general class of pragmatic markers (items which mark speakers’ personal

meanings, their organisational choices, attitudes and feelings). These include:

discourse markers and how speakers use them to structure and organise the

discourse and to monitor the state of the unfolding talk (