Interview

Ronald Carter

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Would you please talk briefly about the ten-year CANCODE research project into spoken and written grammars which were funded by Cambridge University Press? In corpora studies, we usually do much recording without the subjects' knowledge. Don't you think it will lead to any ethical problems? Is there any possibility of establishing audio-visual corpora in that speaking activity is both verbal and non-verbal so that we can have an insight into the nature of human speech?
Influenced by Sinclair in particular, my colleague Michael McCarthy and I have developed here in Nottingham the CANCODE corpus which is a corpus of naturally occurring authentic spoken English which has been computerized and software developed to enable us to read and understand better the way in which everyday spoken English works. That corpus has also informed work with QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) and DfES (Department for Education and Skills). And it is also working its way into the latest language teaching materials.

For example, Professor McCarthy and I have just finished The Cambridge Grammar of English (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which is looking at spoken grammar alongside written grammar, and taking spoken grammar very seriously, arguing that when we speak, we use slightly different grammars from when we write. There is continuity of course, but if you only learn written grammar, then you are not learning the whole of the language. So we feel that as applied linguists, we have to apply this knowledge from corpus linguistics to teaching and learning contexts of English.

Now there are difficulties in producing a spoken corpus that you could imagine. You have to persuade people to cooperate. They have to not object to be recorded. They need to be unself-conscious when they speak if we are to catch something that is really natural in their speech. It has taken about ten years to produce this corpus. Because getting the data is difficult, getting the data from different parts of the country is difficult and getting the data from both men and women in different social contexts, different age groups is a very complex procedure. You need to be very systematic if you are to catch the real functions of the language in use around the country. And it then has to be transcribed and then we may have the problems of computerizing the data so that it can be read by software and interpreted by software so that we get the most frequent spoken information.

There have been times when we have had ethical problems. Sometimes we recorded people without their knowing. We had to get permission retrospectively. Sometimes people haven't wanted to give permission. Sometimes they gave the permission, but they wanted us to anonymize them as speakers and anonymize the places where it was recorded. So we have authentic language, but a lot have been changed in terms of names and places and dates and so on, because people are very protective of how they speak.

The next phase, as you quite rightly suggest in your question, is to produce a spoken corpus that is non-verbal as well as verbal, to produce a video corpus where the camera captures all the features of interpersonal communication that are non-verbal, just as you are doing at the moment, nodding in agreement, smiling, moving your hand and leaning your body forward, indicating through eye movements and so on that you are listening, agreeing, objecting, interpolating comment and so on.

And you are quite right to say that, although we have taken ten years collecting a spoken corpus, the really big job is to spend the next ten years to put a video corpus together so that we have a video record to show how people talk. This will be very interesting to learners of English throughout the world because visually people talk differently according to the culture with which they feel most familiar. So some cultures have people communicating together, some cultures prefer people to lean back when they talk, not get very close. Some cultures nod in very different ways, some provide back channeling words like yes, right, OK, mmm, that kind of back channeling, but some cultures don't provide that channeling. So perceptions of politeness are different in different cultures. Misunderstanding can occur even in the use of English across different cultures.

And it is important therefore to have the further information to complement the linguistic information so that we can essentially provide better language teaching materials. To go back to Halliday and Sinclair, better language material is more authentic, more discourse-driven, more corpus-informed, more rooted in real language as it is actually used.

In terms of literature and language, your main interest is in the relationship between language and creativity, especially with reference to spoken discourse. Do you think your newly published book Language and Creativity — the Art of Common Talk is your representative works in this realm? What is most striking to me in this book is the application of systems theory to this study. Can you elaborate on the concepts of line and cline?
Literary language is a very important part of applied linguistics and natural language studies. There are many courses throughout the world that investigate English literature, American literature, Chinese literature, lots of different world literatures. Very few actually look closely at how language is used in literary texts. And both Halliday and Sinclair have written articles in their time about stylistics that link between literature and language and they are undertaking literary linguistics study. That is the area I am particularly interested in.

I am interested in applying linguistics to the analysis of poetry, novels and drama to help us better understand how language works in that text. The basic starting point is that literature is made from language and therefore the more we can understand about how the language in the literary text works, the better we will be in a position to begin to interpret that text. It is also clear to me, too, that literary language is not absolute. It is not a yes-no category. You can't say that something is literary and something isn't literary, because every day we find examples in newspaper headlines, in advertisements, in jokes, in everyday conversations of people being creative, of playing with the words, of being inventive with language. They develop new strategies for interpersonal communication which is playful, witty, funny, clever and creative.

And in the book that I have just finished, the one you mentioned, Language and Creativity, I've looked in particular at corpus here in Nottingham, the 5 million-word spoken corpus and how that corpus demonstrates on a daily basis that we are all quite regularly creative and playful in the way we use the language. Language is not simply the preserve of major literary writers, but is also something that all people possess and are capable of when they use the language.

Therefore literary language is probably best described as a continuum from literary to non-literary. Maybe there is a theory to clines. Different users, different readers, different people and different contexts will view the use of language accordingly. Sometimes, if the language lasts over several years, we might consider it to be more literary because it is valued by people in our community. But sometimes something can be creative just in one moment, in one exchange, in one witty remark. It is ephemeral, it gets lost, but it is still creative, but it is more likely to be along the non-literary end of the cline. When we write a letter to a bank manager or a credit card company or a garage about the service of our car, that language will be probably non-literary.

So language is constantly moving along the cline from non-literary to literary and from literary to non-literary. And these clines are clines of creativity. So we are not saying only certain people are creative, we are saying that everybody can be creative. Creativity is the preserve not just of special individuals, but the special property of all individuals.

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