Conversational grammar - bad grammar? A situation-based description of quotative 'I goes' in the BNC

Everyday spoken language has a long tradition of being seen as the poor relation of the written language. The use of certain terminologies in corpus linguistic studies of conversational grammar reveals that this tradition is continuing. This paper argues that an alternative view is possible, a view which recognises the inherent value of conversation, which lies in the adaptedness of conversational language to constraints set by the conversational 'situation type' (Halliday 1978). The use of 'I goes' is examined as a case in point. The form is investigated in terms of its distribution across registers, its morphosyntax, and the discourse and situational factors that bear on its use. The discourse and situational factors are discussed on the basis of a detailed analysis of a sample of 90 occurrences of 'I goes' in the context of 100 words each. It is shown that 'I goes' acts both as a multi-turn quotative, that is, as a reporting clause in presentations of extended stretches of anterior conversation with frequent occurrences of speaker change, and as a speech-economic device freeing processing resources that the narrator can bring to bear on the achievement of the underlying purpose of storytelling, namely to indicate 'the point' of the narrative (Labov 1972). In this perspective, I argue, 'I goes' can be seen as a skilled adaptation to two constraints set by the conversational situation: the fundamental scarcity of time and its relational goal-orientation. In the concluding section, I argue that a situation-based approach may foster a tradition of acknowledging the value of conversational language as adapted language, an acknowledgment which is needed particularly in EFL teaching, where the status of Standard English as the unrivalled model for teaching both writing and speech is preventing important corpus linguistic insights from trickling into EFL classrooms. Finally, I also stress the usefulness of relating corpus linguistic findings to theories derived from non-corpus linguistic research. Adapted from the source document