Genre and Syntax

[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 their 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; there's a somewhat more
up-to-date bibliography at URL http://www.english.hss.cmu.edu/langs.html
compiled in connection with a seminar I taught a few years ago.

Look also at Chafe and Danielewitz in Rosalind Horowitz, ed.,
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 UP 1996) - Eli Ochs, Mani Schegloff & Sandy Thompson.)

Oh, and don't forget there's been a large body of work over the
last few decades devoted exclusively to the genre "Isolated Fictional
Sentence." A good introduction to this school is a small book by N.
Chomsky pubished in 1957; I forget its exact title. The chief problem
with this work is that its practitioners seem to harbor the illusion
that the IFS is a significant genre, and have based an entire theory of
language on it.

 - Paul Hopper