Revision Flashcards
Spoken language functions
- Referential: utterances that provide information
- Expressive: utterances that express the speaker’s feelings
- Transactional: utterances where the main purpose is to get something done or acquire something
- Interactional: utterances where the main emphasis is on the social relationship between the participants
- Phatic: utterances devoid of any serious content ‘small talk’, usually conducted with strangers or people only slightly known
Utterance
- We do not use the term ‘sentences’ when discussing spoken language but use ‘utterances’ instead
- A unit of spoken language, the end of which is indicated by a pause or a change of speaker.
- This term is used to describe a ‘spoken sentence’ as an utterance may not follow the expectations and grammatical rules of a written sentence
Non-frequency features
- Hesitations/pauses: give time to think
- Voiced pauses eg ‘um’, ‘er’ which also give time to think
- Fillers: eg ‘sort of’, ‘I mean’, ‘you know’…
- False starts: when a speaker begins an utterance, then stops and reformulates it. eg ‘next t (.) behind the wall’
- Repetitions: e.g. ‘and I was I was trying…’
- Vague language: e.g. ‘and so on’, ‘or whatever’, ‘whatsit’…
- Hedges: words and phrases which soften or weaken the impact of an utterance e.g. ‘I’m not sure but…’, ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’…
Informality features
- Colloquialism: a word or phrase commonly used by many in conversational or informal language but not in formal speech or writing. eg ‘I gave him a quid.’
- Slang: informal words and phrases used by a specific social group. Most slang words have a very brief life span. eg ‘groovy, phat, radical, smokin’ have all been used to express sincere enthusiasm. Once dated they tend only to be used ironically
- Clipping: when words are shortened to one of their parts e.g. phone/telephone, ad/advertisement, gym/gymnasium
- Elision: the running together of sounds/syllables e.g. gonna/going to, wassup/what’s up
- Contraction: a reduced form often marked by an apostrophe e.g. can’t/cannot, she’ll/she will
- Ellipsis: the omission of a word or more. e.g. ‘Like a drink?’ instead of ‘Would you like a drink?’
- Informal terms of address: eg ‘pet, love, mate…’
Styles of speaking
- Accent: the ways in which words are pronounced.
- Dialect: The distinctive grammar and vocabulary associated with a region.
- Sociolect: the distinctive grammar and vocabulary associated with a social group.
- Idiolect: an individual’s distinctive style of speaking
Paralinguistic and Prosodic Features
These are the vocal effects we can employ when we speak.
Prosodic features are commonly referred to as “tone of voice”.
We can make our speech breathy or nasal or husky or creaky to create desired effects. Some people use very obvious lip-rounding when they talk to babies or small animals: “Coochy coochy coo.”
- Whispering is one of the best examples; giggling and laughing also come into this category
- Pitch
- Pause
- Stress
- Volume
- Speed
- Rhythm
Paralinguistic Features
- Paralinguistic add meaning to the text but without using language. E.g. Graphology, pictures
- In spoken communication, we use and interpret these features without really thinking about them – body language for example!
- There are various conventional ways of representing them in writing, although the nuances are often hard to convey on paper
Rhetoric
- Balanced Structure - A sentence where two halves balance each other
- Contrast (antithesis) - Where reality is contrasted with what the speaker is offering or fighting for. It may be to mock the opposition.
- Direct address – Directly addressing those who are in your audience (second person personal pronouns i.e. “you”)
- Figurative Language/Imagery - Language that is not used in a literal way (similes, metaphors etc)
- Hyperbole - Exaggerated speech.
- Repetition - Helps the audience retain key points.
- Rhetorical cohesion - May be achieved through syntactic parallelism, repetitions and phonological patterns.
- Rhetorical Question - A question not intended to be answered, or which the speaker/writer answers themselves.
- Syntactic parallelism - The repetition of sentence structure.
- Synthetic Personalisation - Where a speaker/writer, uses the second person pronoun to synthesise or fake a personal relation to the audience.
- Triads - A pattern of three words or phrases
Conversation Analysis
A sequence is a unit of conversation that consists of two or more functionally related turns.
A turn is a time during which a single participant speaks, within a sequence.
Turns happen in a typical, orderly arrangement in which participants speak with minimal overlap and gap between them.
Adjacency pairs
- An adjacency pair is a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one turn each by two speakers. The turns are related to each other in such a fashion that the first turn requires a certain type or range of types of second turn
- Adjacency pairs are used for starting and closing a conversation
- Adjacency pairs are used for moves in conversations
- First utterance in adjacency pair has the function of selecting next speaker
- Components in adjacency pairs can be used to build longer sequences
- Question – answer
- Greeting – greeting
- Offer – acceptance
- Request – acceptance
- Complaint - excuse
Question and answers
- The level of response varies according to the type of question used.
- Questions can be divided into closed and open questions.
- ‘Wh-’ questions and ‘how’ questions are generally open, as they leave a fairly open agenda for the speaker who answers.
- Closed questions are also called yes-no questions.
Answer
Assurance of ignorance Suggestion for asking someone else (re-routing) Postponement Refusal to provide an answer Challenge to presuppositions of question Challenge to questioner’s sincerity
Breaking adjacency pairs
As an accepted part of conversational structure, adjacency pairs have strong in-built expectationsQuestions are generally answered, statements are acknowledged, complaints are replied to and greetings are exchanged.
There are instances where these are not followed, which often suggests the speaker is avoiding the discussion.
This will tie over to face theory when we explore it
Side Sequence
A side sequence is a sequence of turns that intervenes between the first and second parts of an adjacency pair
Exchange Structure
Adjacency pairs can also be extended into adjacency triplets, more commonly known as 3-part exchanges, they consist of three moves:
• Initiation
• Response
• Follow-up or Feedback
