The title of this paperback edition, partially updated from the 1998 version (“Postscript” pp. 443–52), is somewhat misleading, since the book is a comparison of spoken and written language, using data sets from English, French, Russian, and German and examples from other languages. The authors draw upon a range of theoretical approaches to show differences between spoken and written language and to identify similarities in spoken language across cultures; analytic methods are carefully explicated throughout. Discussion of the corpora used stresses comparability, with special attention to the education level of speakers, since the speech of highly educated individuals tends to more closely resemble written language. A rigid distinction between spoken and written language is rejected in favor of a continuum across which differences are documented—for example, that written language exhibits more complex structures, and that some structures used frequently in writing rarely if ever occur in spontaneous speech, and visa versa. The authors consider the clause to be the basic unit for both spoken and written language, while “the sentence should be regarded as a low-level discourse unit of written language” (28), noting that the concept of the sentence has changed over time, and differs across cultures.

Ch. 2, “Sentences and clauses,” presents a rare, unflinching, and valuable account of the normally hidden costs of attempting to convey transcriptions of spoken language via the convention of sentences. Ch. 3, “Clauses: Type, combination, and integration,” concludes that a cross-linguistically applicable “working definition of clause involves reference to semantic and pragmatic concepts (participants, situations, locations, times, reference, predication, focus, given-new) and to syntactic concepts (distribution of phrases, obligatory and optional constituents)” (77)—the complexity of the definition justified as reflecting the complexity of what clauses do. Investigation of main and subordinate clauses (finite, nonfinite, passive, wh, relative), finds that “spontaneous spoken language has its own syntactic structures and its own patterns of inter-clause connections” (137). In Ch. 4, “Noun phrases: Complexity and configuration,” the comparative methodology is most explicit. The authors find that combinatorial grammar provides the best account for cross-linguistic differences like the “split” NPs of Russian and other languages.

The following two chapters cover focus constructions as means of organizing spoken and written texts. Ch. 5 reviews definitions of “focus” in discourse analysis, including information structure, ellipsis, and highlighting (where particles and word order tend to play an important role). Ch. 6 considers types of cleft and like in spoken English, here identified as a particle that functions as “a non-introductory, non-contrastive focuser which may focus on new or given information” (334). Ch. 7, “Historical linguistics and typology,” is mostly concerned with how structures distinctive to spoken language fit within existing parameters of language-structure typologies. Ch. 8, “Written language, first language acquisition, and education,” critiques Chomskian emphasis on I-language and native speaker intuition as biased through education toward distinctively written forms. This critique is important in view of the indisputable primacy of spoken language, its fundamentally interactive nature, and the structural differences between spoken and written language documented here.