Fries
Fries
Fries
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Charles C. <strong>Fries</strong>, linguistics and corpus linguisticsBy contrast, <strong>Fries</strong>, in all of his work, made every attempt to discover thecharacteristics of the language spoken in the communities while the speakerswere focused on what they were communicating not how they were communicatingit. In other words, he was looking for the vocabulary choices and grammaticalpatterns used in unedited spoken language. His discussion (1927: 137)of the teaching of English to native speakers implied a typical goal:… the schools seem to be committed to the program of equipping thepupils with the language habits of those we have called the sociallyacceptable group. …But he notes a few pages later (1927: 140):There has never been an adequate scientific survey of the spoken languagein English…Indeed, his American English grammar was intended to provide just such a survey.He clearly wished to describe the spoken language (1940a: 27):The ideal material of course for any survey of the inflections and syntaxof present-day American English would be mechanical records ofthe spontaneous, unstudied speech of a large number of carefully chosensubjects.However, before the mid 1940’s it was very difficult to obtain a record of thespoken language, so he had to be satisfied with approximations of spoken languagein the written records. Thus his discussion continues (1940a: 27):The practical difficulties in the way of securing a sufficient number ofrecords of this kind from each of a large number of subjects, sufficientto make possible the kind of study necessary in charting the field, seemto make it prohibitive as a preliminary measure.The use of any kind of written material for the purpose of investigatingthe living language is always a compromise, but at present an unavoidableone and the problem becomes one of finding the best type of writtenspecimines for the purpose in hand.Similarly, his 1922 Ph. D. study of the development of shall and will used dramasas a source of data because:The language of drama is probably nearer to actual usage than that ofother types of literature since the drama carries its effects through thespeaking of actor to actual hearers. At the least, the language of the99