Spoken Language Vocab Flashcards
GASP/MAFF
genre, audience, subject, purpose/mode, audience, field, function.
Speaker identity
identification of a person from the sound of their voice, use of lexis, grammatical structures. Age, gender, class, ethnicity, and occupation…
Situational factors
relationship with the audience, status of the participants, setting, topic, purpose, comfort, spontaneous vs crafted.
Paralinguistic features
body language, gestures, facial expressions, tone and pitch of voice.
Overlapping
when a speaker’s speech overlaps anothers.
Micro pause
a pause in speech less than a second.
Rising intonation
describes how the voice rises at the end of a sentence.
Emphatic stress
the placing of emphasis on a particular word of a sentence.
Adjacency pairs
composed of two utterances by two speakers, one after the other.
Turn taking
during an interaction, speakers take it in turns to speak - this is a politeness feature.
Backchannel support
one participant is speaking and another participant interjects responses to the speaker.
Fillers
words, sounds, or phrases we use to “fill in” the space when we don’t know what to say.
Tag questions
a question converted from a statement by an appended interrogative formula, e.g. it’s nice out, isn’t it?
Topic markers
how to identify the main topic of a conversation.
Topic shifters
when the topic shifts to something else during a conversation.
Topic loops
when the conversations loops back to a previous topic.
Idiolect
the speech habits specific to a particular person.
Sociolect
the dialect of a particular social class.
Accent
a distinctive way of pronouncing a language, especially one associated with a particular country, area, or social class.
Dialect
a regional variety of language.
Interrupted constructions
false starts e.g. “You shouldn’t - you shouldn’t have done that”.
Disjointed constructions
two phrases which don’t seem to go together.
Incomplete constructions
grammatical elements are missing e.g. “You get sorted?”.
Non-standard grammar
using double negatives or informality e.g. “We was half an hour late”.
Maxim of quality
Truth: Do not say which you believe to be false, or cannot prove to be true.
Maxim of quantity
Information: Make your contribution as informative as is necessary.
Maxim of manner
Clarity: Avoid ambiguity. Speak clearly.
Maxim of relevance
Relevance: Be relevant. Do not return to topics previously discussed.
Positive politeness
makes the hearer feel good about themselves, interests, or possessions.
Negative politeness
strategies involve showing respect for someone’s autonomy and minimising imposition.
Humour
the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in literature or speech.
Satire
the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticise people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
Hedging
a writer may not be sure of the claims that are being made in their subject area, or perhaps the ideas are good but the evidence is not very strong.
Positive Face
the need for self-image to be accepted, appreciated and approved of by others.
Negative Face
is the need to be independent, to have freedom of action, and not to be imposed on by others.
Face Threatening Act
is an act (linguistic or non-linguistic) that threatens someone’s positive or negative face.
Off Record
to express something general or different than the speaker’s true meaning and relies on the hearer’s interpretation to have the speaker’s purpose conveyed.
Divergence
a situation in which two things become different. Making our language different to the person’s we are talking to.
Convergence
making our language more like the person’s we are talking to.
Upward Convergence
when a person with a strong regional accent tones their accent down and moves it closer to RP or Standard English.
Downward Convergence
when an RP speaker tones down his accent in the company of working class speakers.
Mutual Convergence
when both speakers move closer to each other (e.g. by modifying their accents/formality).
Standard English
the form of English widely recognised and accepted as ‘correct’.
Received Pronunciation
the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English.
