ABSTRACT
It is now well established that written language is very different from the spoken variety. Speech is generally interactive – we bat words and phrases back and forth – and produced within a shared context, so it’s fragmented and disorganised, and a great deal of meaning goes by ‘on the nod’. In fact, you can get by in speech without ever forming a sentence, or at least only very simple ones. To make links between ideas, speakers tend to use very simple connectives, such as the ubiquitous and or, to denote sequence, and then. This kind of language is described by linguists as ‘spontaneous speech’.
