EnglishGrammarinConversation.docVIP

English Grammar in Conversation  Geoffrey Leech DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE,?LANCASTER UNIVERSITY, LANCASTER LA1 4YT, UK ? A thorough description of spoken English grammar is felt to be overdue. After all, spoken language has largely been neglected by grammatical tradition; the word?grammar?itself descends from the classical Greek word for writing. The grammarians bias towards the written language remains strong today, and is reflected in such terminology as left dislocation and right dislocation in referring to grammatical transformations. To understand these terms, we have to think of a sentence as immobile and visible on the page, like a laboratory specimen, rather than as an ongoing phenomenon of speech. Morever, discrimination in favour of the written sentence, in grammars, has to some extent been reinforced by the advent of computer corpora, simply because until very recently corpora of spoken language have not been available in sufficient quantity and coverage. The opportunity now exists, however, for corpus linguistics to redress this balance, by taking advantage of the new availability, in the 1990s, of large and varied spoken English corpora. These include notably the spoken component of the British National Corpus, collected by Longman; the spoken component of the Bank of English corpus, collected by the Collins COBUILD team, and the CANCODE corpus, collected by Cambridge University Press. (To say that these publishers collected these spoken corpora is convenient shorthand for saying that they organized, and paid for, their collection.) It is significant that all these large computer corpora of speech have been brought into existence by major British dictionary publishers: in fact, a fourth such publisher, Oxford University Press, was the lead partner of the whole British National Corpus project. The project on which I am about to report1?was also sponsored by a publisher: Addison Wesley Longman. It is a project leading to a la