Spoken vs. Written or Dialogue vs. Non-Dialogue? Frequency Analysis of Verbs, Nouns and Prepositional Phrases in Bulgarian

In linguistics, the difference between spoken and written language is often interpreted in terms of frequency, meaning the extent of the likelihood that some constructions will occur in written texts, rather than in the spoken form of a language, or vice versa. For Bulgarian, frequency analyses for particular constructions are still rare and the term “frequency” generally remains implicit to the written or the spoken form of the language. In this paper it is argued that the term “frequency” can be meaningful only if it is grounded in an analysis of both written and spoken texts. The primary focus of the study is the frequency of verbs, nouns and prepositional phrases in different types of spoken and written samples. Since neither the written nor the spoken form of Bulgarian, or, indeed, of any language, can be considered homogeneous, it is argued that the differences between spoken and written language can be viewed as differences between dialogue and non-dialogue: i.e., that it is not the mode itself, but rather the structuring of information and its density, which constitutes the difference between the spoken and written modes.