Affinities of Text Types to Typical Spoken and Written Registers

Affinities of Text Types to Typical Spoken and Written Registers

The purpose of this study is to identify the relative degree of affinities of 12 text types to typical spoken and written registers, using the frequencies of nine grammatical features which are exclusively pervasive only in spoken or in written discourse. Two registers, everyday conversation and academic prose, were set as a norm to measure the relative distances of other registers. Oral features like interrogatives, progressives, personal pronouns, and contractions are pervasive in spoken registers, but rare in written ones. Passives and adverbs with -ly are the opposite case. The findings of the study showed that soap drama appeared to be the most oral, and academic prose to be the most literal text. Fictions turned out to be very close to everyday conversation. Being a written text, blogs, internet, and articles of magazine and newspaper appeared to be much less literal because of uses of many oral features. Meanwhile, texts from the U.S. Supreme Court and Wikipedia turned out to be literate, containing features of academic prose. It is suggested that learners have to be accustomed to the various registers, distinguish between them, and produce different types of texts to test and refine their receptive knowledge of registers.