ABSTRACT
The following comments simply confirm the context and indicate some of the features that could be explored in greater depth.
Buying a train (or coach) ticket. The roles of the two participants are fixed in advance, so there is little need to spell out aspects such as ‘Give me [a day return]’, or to negotiate politeness. If the speaker started ‘I wonder if you could …’ the ticket seller would assume a non-standard request (e.g. for help) was coming.
From an advertisement. The only modality ‘can’ comes when the writer is not talking about the product (the Heineken slogan ‘Probably the best lager in the world’ played precisely on the expectation that advertisers do not modalize or hedge their claims). The punctuation separates parts that are grammatically linked, probably to suggest the unplanned afterthoughts of speech rather than writing. The deliberate use of ‘we’ rather than ‘the company’ suggests a more personal, human interaction with the reader/customer.
From an informal conversation. There are some discourse markers that belong to informal speech (‘Well you see’); ‘this’ used for what is clearly the first mention of the letter is typical of oral narratives (including jokes); and the repeated ‘she’ is unlikely to occur in more formal writing. It is syntactically fairly complex (you will be analysing it in detail in Chapter 7): this is actually typical of speech – see Halliday (1985b/89) – as is the use of ‘simple’ conjunctions (‘and’, ‘so’) to hold together the complexity.
From a novel, Monk’s-Hood (Ellis Peters, 1980). Clearly a narrative, because of the past tense and the personal details (i.e. it is not, for example, a history textbook). A written rather than an oral narrative because of the amount of detail: the way the character is named; the purely ‘scenic’ detail (‘nodding his head’) – in an oral narrative, details, if given, are normally evaluative or advance the storyline; the piling up of attributive clauses (e.g. ‘stubbly chin jutting’) and of adjectives. The writer is clearly determined to let the reader ‘see’ the scene.
From a handbook for overseas students planning to study in Britain. The addressees are clearly students but they are referred to in the third person rather than as ‘you’. The verbal group ‘must … write’ is interrupted by a long interpolation setting out exact details of the requirements; where there are choices in structural and lexical forms the formal option is chosen (‘will have decided’ rather than ‘decide’; ‘to which institutions they wish to seek admission’ rather than ‘the institutions (that) they want to apply to’). One aspect of the formality is a preference for nominalizations rather than verbs (‘admission’, ‘receipt’). The whole sentence is very complex indeed (as you will discover when you analyse it in Chapter 7).
From a recipe. There is a typical pattern of purpose (‘to make’) followed by unsoftened commands (‘divide’, ‘press’, etc.). Step-by-step instructions are given, but with little explicit sequencing (‘next’): writer and reader expect each step to follow in order. It is also accepted, though, that equipment (‘an unfloured surface’) need not be brought in as a separate step. Some signs of informal chattiness (‘nicely’) tend to occur in the middle of an otherwise relatively neutral style. (See Chapter 3 for more on the organization of recipes.)
From a textbook, University Physics (H. D. Young, 8th edition, 1992). The technical terminology stands out, often consisting of nominal groups with densely packed information in front of the main noun (e.g. ‘a two-source interference pattern’ rather than ‘a pattern of interference from two sources’). The use of ‘we’ reflects the writer/teacher cooperatively taking the reader/student through the steps of the operation; and the future-oriented discussion (‘we may’, ‘we have to’), guiding the reader’s actions, is more typical of textbooks written by experts for non-experts than of research papers written for other experts.
A cheat: it’s from a poem, ‘Song at the Beginning of Autumn’, by Elizabeth Jennings; but to make it a bit less obvious that this was a poem, I didn’t keep the original layout. There are unusual collocations (‘evocations in the air’); the present tense does not refer to habitual actions as usual but is used for ‘instantaneous narration’; there is a tension between the highly personal content and the relatively formal style, which suggests literature rather than conversation (which is the other likely context for talk of memories, etc.); and the reader needs to make an effort to construct coherence in the text – the connections between the statements are not immediately obvious (poetry shares with informal conversation the readiness of interactants to do more collaborative work on interpreting meanings).
