Grammars of Spoken English: New Outcomes of Corpus-Oriented Research

Recently work on the grammar of spoken English has advanced through the use of large, general, and varied corpora of the language, including corpora of spoken discourse. Here I review the research that has been emerging from the availability of such corpora, much of it emphasizing the need for new ways of conceptualizing spoken grammar, to replace the traditional reliance on grammatical models oriented to written language. Although such research tends to stress the need for a new descriptive apparatus for the language of speech, I present arguments for the view that spoken and written language utilize the same basic grammatical repertoire, however different their implementations of it may be.