单选题
This kind of complex meaning expressed in written
language soon becomes a fish out of water. The complexity of spoken language is
more like that of a dance; it is not static and dense but mobile and intricate.
Much more meaning is expressed by grammar than by vocabulary. As a consequence,
the sentence structure is highly complex, reaching degrees of complexity that
are rarely attained in writing. Writing, as recognized by most
people, is genuinely formal and readily tangible, but speaking language has
merits of its own. It is usually more economic in human face-to-face
communication, and it allows the omission of many contextual or commonsensical
information. This permits the oral language to be more simplistic and flexible
than written language. What is difficult or even impossible to achieve in
written language can sometimes be achieved in oral language in a convenient way
that does not demand extra efforts. On the other hand, speech can be more
difficult to manage in linguistic studies due to such factors that make it
readily acceptable as a more economic way of expression. It is
in spontaneous, operational speech that the grammar is most fully exploited,
such that its semantic frontiers expand and its potential for meaning is
enhanced. This is why we have to look to spoken discourse for at least some of
the evidence on which to base our theory of the language. Philosophers of
language have tended to take over the folk belief, typical of a written culture,
according to which spoken language is disorganized and featureless, while only
writing shows a wealth of structure and purity of pattern. This is
'demonstrated' by transcriptions in which speech is reduced to writing and made
to look like a dog' s dinner. Now speech was not meant to be written down, so it
often looks silly, just as writing often sounds silly when it is read aloud; but
the disorder and fragmentation are a feature of the way it is transcribed. Even
a sympathetic transcription like that above cannot represent it adequately,
because it shows none of the intonation or variation in tempo and loudness; but
it does show the way it is organized grammatically, and so enable us to analyze
it as a text.
单选题
The author compares spoken language to "a dance" to say that ______ .