Features of spoken language

1. Ellipses- omission of part of a word
2. "Er", "um", "you know" are examples of fillers
3. Idiolect- an individually distinctive style of speaking
4. "sort of", "like" are examples of voiced pauses
5. Back channeling- listener feedback signalling support and understanding
6. Deixis- words which point to something outside of the text
7. pitch, pace, stress and rhythm are examples of prosodic features
8. "gonna", "gimme" are examples of elision
9. "We was going down the road" and "he didn't know nothing" are examples of non-standard grammar
10. hesitation, repetition and false starts are examples are examples of non-fluency features
11. Adjacency pairs- Question-answer pairs and greeting-greeting pairs
12. Phatic talk- small talk
13. "It's okay here, isn't it?" is an example of a tag question
14. Gestures and facial expression are examples of paralinguistic features
15. "Anyway", "So" are likely to be examples of discourse markers
16. Pragmatics is the study of- what a speaker means rather than simply the words they say
17. Rather than using the term sentence in describing spoken language we use the word- utterance