ABSTRACT
Recent work in sociolinguistics has clearly established the responsiveness of language to situational and contextual variation. This can be put more strongly by saying that the very structure of language reflects the significant features of the situation in which it is produced, and whose meanings it encodes. If this is so for language in general, it would be most surprising if it were not the case for the two distinctly different modes in which language occurs: speech on the one hand, and writing on the other.
