tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "SHOULD COMPUTERS WRITE SPOKEN LANGUAGE?"

Recently there has developed a great deal of interest in the differences between written and spoken language. I joined this trend a little more than a year ago, and have been exploring not only what the specific differences are, but also the reasons why they might exist. The approach I have taken has been to look for differences between the situations and processes involved in speaking on the one hand and writing on the other, and to speculate on how those differences might be responsible for the observable differences in the output, ~ a t happens when we write. | SHOULD COMPUTERS WRITE SPOKEN LANGUAGE Wallace L. Chafe University of California Berkeley Recently there has developed a great deal of interest in the differences between written and spoken language. I joined this trend a little more than a year ago and have been exploring not only what the specific differences are but also the reasons why they might exist. The approach I have taken has been to look for differences between the situations and processes involved in speaking on the one hand and writing on the other and to speculate on how those differences might be responsible for the observable differences in the output. What happens when we write and what happens when we speak are different things both psychologically and socially and I have been trying to see how what we do in the two situations leads to the specific things that we find in writing and speaking. I occasionally interact with the UNIX computer system at Berkeley for various purposes. In the context of my concern about differences between writing and speaking I have begun to wonder whether the kind of communication we are used to receiving from computers is more like writing or speaking. You may think that computers obviously write to us. They send US messages that we can read off of a cathode ray tube or that get printed out for us on a piece of paper. In that respect what computers produce is written language. But it comes at us in a way that is very different from the way written language usually does. Usually we are faced with a printed page on which the writing is all there and has been there for a long time. The temporal process by which the writing was put there has absolutely no relevance to US as we peruse the page at our leisure. The timing of our reading Is in no way controlled by the timing by which the words were entered on the page. My computer terminal on the other hand is steadily chugging away producing language before my eyes at the rate of 30 characters a second. Under some .