Tham khảo tài liệu 'longman grammar of spoken and written english part 79', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | The constructional principles of spoken grammar 1071 ten of AmE and ten of BrE conversation . Since the length of each unit particularly non-clausal units is often very small - one or two words - we also made a count of words comprising the clausal units and non-clausal units. The brief excerpt below shows a specimen of how the analysis was done C-unit boundaries are marked and are followed except at the beginning of the passage by Cl clausal or NCI non-clausal to indicate the kind of unit that precedes. A So do you think an alligator would like salt water Cl B It would probably kill him wouldn t it Cl A That one on the news has been out in the ocean for a while. Cl B Really NCl C What are you talking about Cl I didn t hear. Cl A That alligator in the ocean. NCI I was asking him how he thought it liked salt water. Cl C Oh. NCl Amu Table shows the results of the count. Table Distribution of clausal units and non-clausal units in a sample of AmE and BrE conversation dausal units non-clausal units total unit count 614 386 1000 100 word count 4615 754 5369 100 words per unit CORPUS FINDINGS Non-clausal units account for over one-third of the units in conversation. However their average length is only two words. DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS Table shows the proportion of non-clausal material in conversation from two perspectives. Although the frequency of non-clausal units is high more than a third of all units their length on average is less than two words. This is largely because nearly a half of all non-clausal units consists of single-word inserts that is stand-alone words such as interjections. These inserts have been treated as grammatically independent in cases where punctuation marks pauses or turn-boundaries in the transcription separate them from the preceding and following units . Hi in the following exchange is a separate non-clausal unit A Hi B I like your outfit ame However in cases where they are .
