Advantages And Disadvantages Of Expletive Infixation

As expletive infixation is primarily a feature of spoken language, it is a necessity to understand the typical features of spoken language and the ‘rules’ that govern it to understand it as a linguistic phenomenon. Spoken language is a very different form of interaction from written language. Spoken language is primarily used to maintain social relationships, although it is used in many contexts one might not expect social relationships to be developed - such as speeches and lectures. (Brown & Yule 1999, 11) Another important function is to convey information, and there is a certain pressure in putting together speech that is cohesive and informational, but also relatable to the listener. (Brazil 1995, 11) The pressure is what makes the grammar of speech so different from written English – as the speech event only happens once and it has a restricted time frame, the bare necessities of grammar can also make do.

As expletive infixation is primarily a feature occurring in spoken language, extracts of spoken language were needed to analyse tokens. In this study movie scripts are used because transcriptions of informal spoken language are hard to find in large quantities, because their collection and transcription is time consuming and problematic – when spoken language is being recorded speakers inadvertently monitor their language and the result is language reminiscent of written language. Although Sinclair (1991, 19) refers to movie and theatre language as “quasi-speech”, it was not possible to use actual spoken language to build a corpus of the size required for this

the number of general non-specific words and phrases, the use of interactive expressions like well, oh, and uh-uh, all contribute to the general impression that information is packed more loosely in spoken English than in written English. (Brown & Yule 1999, 6) In the next example almost all of these features are