Abstract
Abstract Another property that varies between spontaneous spoken language and written language is the structure and complexity of phrases. This observation is not new. For Russian Sirotinina (1974: 79–80) establishes a scale of genres going from formal written language through academic spoken discourse, literary discourse, and informal letters to conversation. She observes that as one moves along the scale from formal writing to spontaneous speech the number of full nouns diminishes as does the number of adjectives. For full nouns she cites figures of 386 per 1,000 words in formal writing but only 142 in conversation; and for adjectives, 152 per 1,000 words in formal writing but only 39 in conversation. Krasil’nikova (1990: 20) also mentions the lack of complex and combined phrases but notes additional properties of NPs in spontaneous spoken Russian; typically only the final noun in an NP has a case affix, and in frequent phrasal combinations of words the case of the first word spreads to the other words (Krasil’nikova 1990: 31).
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