syntax in different discourse genres

[Paul J Hopper]

Excerpts from mail: 10-Sep-97 syntax in different discour.. by Frederick
Newmeyer at u.was
>
> Could somebody please help me with a literature reference or two? I am
> interested in work that describes the differences in syntactic
> constructions in different genres: narratives, conversations, lectures,
> written texts of various sorts, and so on.
>
> I assume that construction types that are common in one genre are rare in
> another. Is there work that talks about the differences?
>

I suppose it depends on how narrowly you're conceiving "construction
types". There was recently a conference in Santa Barbara that looked
quite critically at the whole question of "constituency" and what would
count as evidence for it. The well-known work of Douglas Biber (e.g. in
Language 62,2:1986, 384-414) takes several dozen syntactic/semantic
features and studies there implementation in different text types. If
you include the literature on oral/written language, the bibliography
will be quite large. Chafe and Tannen's review in the Annual Reviews of
Anthropology of 1987 would be a start; also Chafe and Danielewitz in the
volume edited by Rosalind Horowitz (Comprehending Oral & Written Lang.
1987) with an extensive list of syntactic/semantic features of speaking
vs writing. If you go further and include the work of those who consider
other genres to be derivative of conversation, you'd have to include the
entire Conversation Analysis school (a significant account of this work
is the modestly titled "Introduction" by the editors of Interaction &
Grammar (Cambridge 1996), Eli Ochs, Mani Schegloff, Sandy Thompson.)
Oh, and don't forget there's been a fairly large body of work over the
last few decades studying the genre "Isolated Fictional Sentence." A
good introduction to this is a small book by N. Chomsky pubished in
1957; I forget its exact title. The problem with this work is that its
practitioners seemd to be under the illusion that it was a significant
genre.

- Paul Hopper