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Abstract

Knowles highlights two crucial points with regards to spoken language here: first, our common expectations, driven by years of schooling, to expect language to be the written word; and second, that spoken language appears to follow a pattern quite different to what we have in written text, giving rise to the impression that the spoken is “disjointed and inarticulate”.

If you have occasion to write a conversation down, you are very likely to find it disjointed, stumbling and inarticulate. If you do react like this, that is because what you expect to find in speech follows your expectation of written language, particularly prose. It is difficult not to regard speech as an imperfect version of the written language.

(Knowles, 1987: 5)

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© 2015 Michael Pace-Sigge

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Pace-Sigge, M. (2015). OF and TO Usage in Spoken Texts. In: The Function and Use of TO and OF in Multi-Word Units. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137470317_5

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