If some texts are “more written” than others, the chances are excellent that they will be “more nominal” as well. In a print culture, you could say, language is first frozen in type, then cloned onto pages, with the result that the abstractions and reified states of a nominal style are easier to understand. Or vice versa: nominal prose supplies the categories and fine distinctions into which a print culture tends to proliferate. In what follows, examples of nominal, verbal, oral, and written styles will be drawn from publications and private writings of the eighteenth and other centuries, including passages in Johnson, Swift, Godwin, Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and the Directions for Form 1040 of the Internal Revenue Service (USA).

MORE AND LESS IN ORALITY AND WRITTENNESS

In chapter 2, I mentioned the possibility of a graded polarity between orality and writtenness in texts or styles or language use. Many of the features that seemed to differentiate early eighteenth-century prose from more gentrified later texts have a motivation in this polarity; they suggest to us that in general what was published in the first quarter of the century was more closely affiliated to the world of speech than were publications after 1770. Conversely, late eighteenth-century prose is the prose of a print culture. On the one hand, interruptedness, solecisms, loose sentences, redundancies of various kinds (including initial coordinating conjunctions, doublets, and the pleonastic do), proverbs, physical words (as opposed to abstractions) – all these have a useful, natural function in speech (though they are also common enough in printed texts).