Spoken Language

• Interactional
• Referential
• Expressive
• Transactional
• Phatic

Language of informal speech, it has a social function

Provides the listener with information

Highlights speakers emotions, feelings or attitudes

Getting information or making a deal e.g. buying ot selling

Social talk e.g. about the weather

• Worked out in advance
• For a specific audience & purpose
• Formal
• Performed
• Needs to maintain listener's interest
• May include rhetorical devices

• Not prepared
• Delivered on the spot
• Informal
• Mainly in response to another speaker
• Non fluency features

• Ellipsis
• Phatic talk
• False starts
• Back channelling
• Deixis
• Fillers
• hedges
• Elision
• Interruptions/overlaps
• repetition
• hesitation

• Opening
• Responses
• Adjacency pairs
• Signalling closure
• Closure

A speaker may pause to indicate it is the other person's turn to speak, a domineering participant may interrupt

Attached to the end of statements to invite a response

When one speaker changes the subject of a conversation

When someone else is speaking people give verbal and non verbal feedback to indicate they are listening