Functions of Language - Volume 2, Issue 1, 1995

There are opposing views on whether speech or writing is more complex syntactically. We investigated the complexity of clause relationships in a range of spoken and written text categories: spontaneous conversations, broadcast discussions, unscripted monologues, personal handwritten letters, academic writing, and non-academic writing. Conversations proved to be the most distinctive category. It had the highest percentage of simple clauses and the lowest percentage of both subordination and coordination. For all the other categories there is not a sharp distinction between speech and writing in any of the measures that were applied.

Current work on lexical collocations uses two ideas: (i) words have distinctive semantic profiles or "prosodies"; and (ii) the strength of association between words can be measured in quantitative terms. These ideas can be combined to provide comparative semantic profiles of words, which show the frequent and characteristic collocates of node words, and make explicit the semantic relations between the collocates.Using data from corpora of up to 120 million words, it is shown that the lemma CAUSE occurs in predominantly "unpleasant" collocations, such as cause of the trouble and cause of death. A case study of this lemma is used to illustrate quantitative methods for investigating collocations. Various methods proposed in the literature are of great practical value in establishing collocational sets, but their theoretical basis is less clear. Brief comparative semantic profiles are given for related lemmas, e.g. REASON and CONSEQUENCE. Implications for the relation between system and use are discussed.

We outline an approach to Theme as a grammatical notion for German. Our starting point is some earlier accounts of Theme in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. These are followed by a consideration of some representational requirements for a treatment of Theme in German. We then suggest an initial account of grammatical Theme in German, followed by some questions relating to historical, typological, and functional explanations of differences observed between English and German.