Across the Line of Speech and Writing Variation

The medium we use to communicate (oral, written, or even gestural) plays an
important role in the way we structure and organize our discourse. To do this,
we can draw on linguistic markers, such as connectives, discourse markers or
frame markers, or on (marked) information structure constructions. What is the
impact of the nature of the medium (spoken vs. written vs. gestural) and of
the style of the discourse at hand (formal vs. informal) on the choice of one
linguistic expression over the other? While medium seems to play a role in the
discrimination between text types (e.g., casual coffee conversation between
colleagues, business meeting, e-novel), it is less clear what the potential
impact is of extra-linguistic parameters, such as emotional weight or
spatiotemporal distance between the interlocutors, on the structuring of those
texts. These questions bring us face to face with the limits of the
traditional dichotomic representation opposing speech and writing on the sole
basis of the medium at hand. The contributions in this volume follow the
suggestion to consider discourse structure not only from the perspective of
variation between the written and the spoken mode, but also from the
perspective of variation on a continuum from formal to informal ways of
communicating.