Insubordination in English: a feature of speech?

This paper challenges the view that insubordination, the use of structurally dependent clauses as independent main clauses (Evans 2007), is primarily a feature of speech by providing a detailed case study of insubordinated exclamatives in English in different registers, making use of the British National Corpus (BNC). Spoken language was contrasted with two other genres, namely narrative fiction and academic prose, to test the hypothesis that insubordination predominantly occurs in speech. The results advocate that insubordination is almost non-existent in academic prose. More importantly, the results clearly indicate that in English, insubordination predominantly occurs in prose fiction and not in conversation. The finding can be explained by assuming that this structure is a suitable means for expressing exclamation in written text. If this is correct, insubordinated exclamatives could be analyzed as a stylistic marker of fiction prose.