A COMPARATIVE CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION OF LINGUISTIC VARIATIONS IN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH

Abstract

This study systematically examines differences in vocabulary, sentence structure, contextual language use, and overall communication patterns between spoken and written English. A mixed-method approach was used in this study. Data were collected through questionnaires administered to speakers from various sociolinguistic backgrounds. The corpus was meticulously transcribed, and the linguistic analysis was conducted using quantitative techniques, such as concordance, frequency, and collocation analyses, to show the frequency of words and phrases. Qualitative methods, that is, by utilising the sketch engine software to identify patterns. The results showed that mistakes are both natural and frequent in both spoken and written discourse. The written discourse is found complex, and the mistakes were frequent in it, such as grammatical, syntactic, misplaced punctuation, orthographic, and subject-verb agreement and tense errors. In spoken discourse, mistakes such as a lack of language exposure, an absence of records, and cognitive difficulties, as well as personal abilities, anxiety, and social factors, were indicated. Results of the current study will help generate instructional language programs, provide a framework, and provide raw data for prospective researchers in the relevant field. It is recommended to investigate and analyse the structural complexities of both spoken and written discourses.