3. Lexical Density

The question of lexical density is closely connected with the question of grammar in written and spoken languages. Spoken and written languages also differ in the ratio of content words to grammatical or function words. Content or lexical words include nouns and verbs, while grammatical words include prepositions, pronouns and articles. The number of lexical or content words per clause is referred to as lexical density.

In the following example there are 12 content words in a single clause, which gives the text the lexical density of 12.Aspoken version is given to the right.

In the spoken version there are 10 content words (control, trains, way, sure, run, safely, quickly, bad, weather, gets) distributed between 5 clauses, which gives the text the lexical density of two. The density of written language is also reinforced by the tendency to create nouns from verbs. Examples of this process are as follows:

Halliday calls this process of turning verbs into nouns grammatical metaphor. In other words, processes or functions which in the grammatical system of English would normally be represented as verbs have been transformed into “things” and represented as nouns. It is this transformation which led Halliday to use the term “metaphor”. These linguistic differences between spoken and written language are not absolutes. As it has already been pointed out, some written texts share many of the characteristics of spoken texts, and vice versa.

4. Indicating Status

Aim, function of communicative act (to entertain, to make somebody do something, to provide information), position of interlocutors in time and space – all this influences our choice of language form – whether written or spoken language. Another important factor for the choice of language is social one. In verbal encounters, what people say to each other, for example, “Bill, why don’t you meet me here tomorrow?” – information they enclose in their messages, is anchored in the mind of speaker A, as evidenced by the words ‘you’, ‘me’, ‘here’, ‘tomorrow’.

These words which we use in a communicative act to anchor some kind of info in the mind of our interlocutor are called deictics.

Deictic – element of speech that points in a certain direction as viewed from the perspective of the speaker, f.e., here, there, today, coming, going. Deixis – process bywhich language indexes the physical, temporal, and social location of the speaker at the moment of utterance. Markers of social deixis give an indication not only of where the speaker stands in time and place – in a ‘today’ in the ‘here’of speaking – but also of his / her status within the social structure, and of the status the speaker gives the addressee. For example, the use of Sie or du in German can index either power or solidarity, distance or closeness. English used to have ‘you’ for distance, ‘thou’ for closeness; now English has only retained the ‘you’, but social deixis in English expresses social position by other forms of address like ‘Bill’, ‘Bill X’, ‘Mister X’, ‘Professor X’ and the like.

These forms of address index:

social class (upper-class German families where Sie is used in conversation between parents and parents and children);

generational culture, as the currently prevalent use of reciprocal Du among students or young people in Germany;

a culture that wants itself to be egalitarian and democratic as in

the informal forms of address used in the United States (‘dear friend’, ‘call me Bill’).

The police’s use of a non-reciprocal tu to address North African youth in France expresses an explicit display of power; being addressed with tu indexes the subordinate or marginal place occupied by these youths in French society today.