Features of spoken English

In a nutshell

When it comes to spoken language, there are social rules people (consciously or subconsciously) follow. These rules are often influenced and/or dictated by the context. As a result, many linguists have identified certain features of the spoken mode that will be explored in this summary.

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Politeness strategies

Politeness is the application of good manners in a conversation so as to not offend others. In the 1950s, a sociologist by the name of Goffman developed the concept of face which refers to a speaker's self-esteem. It was divided into positive face (our need to maintain self-esteem; threatened when we are criticised) and negative face (our self-interest; threatened whenever we are required to do something we don't want to do). This led to the development of four main politeness strategies:

• Bald on-record: the speaker is forceful and direct. (e.g. Close the door!).
  
• Positive politeness: the speaker informally shows interest in and agreement with the other speaker by using jokes or tag questions. (e.g. Pass me the document, will you?).
• Negative politeness: the speaker usually beats around the bush to avoid being direct and uses hedges and negative constructions. (e.g. You must forgive me, I know you're busy, but you wouldn't be able to take a look now, would you?).
• Off-record: the speaker doesn't clearly say what they want so as to not threaten the other's face (e.g. Perhaps someone should have been more responsible.).

Note: Don't confuse the positives and negatives. Positive politeness strategies are not always used to save positive face and negative politeness strategies are not always used to save negative face.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is an area of linguistics that focuses on the study of how context influences the interpretation of a message's meaning. In other words, pragmatics outlines the study of meaning in the interactional context.

Conversational maxims

In 1975, H.P. Grice argued that successful conversations are shaped (unconsciously) by four maxims or principles. 

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• Quantity maxim: contributions to the conversation should be informative to the right extent.
  
• Quality maxim: do not speak of what you do not know or think is untrue.
• Relation maxim: be relevant.
• Manner maxim: do not be ambiguous or express yourself obscurely. Be orderly.
  

Note: it is clear that speakers do not always follow these maxims. It may be that a speaker violates a maxim (failure to fulfil it) or flouts a maxim (obvious failure to fulfil it).

Accommodation

Giles et al proposed in the 1970s that people adapt all aspects of conversation to their listeners, such as adjusting the pace of the conversation, our body language, intonation, emotional state, timing as well as our lexical choices. This is called convergence. It is our desire to gain social approval or find a sense of belonging. These adaptations can go in two different directions:

• Upwardly converge: when you adapt the conversation to someone you believe is superior to you. As a result, you tend to use overt prestige; using more formal standard English which is considered more socially prestigious.  
  
• Downwardly converge: when you adapt the conversation to someone you know or want to know (friends, family, etc.) in order to fit in. You tend to use a variety of language that is appropriate to the members of a social group. This may involve using dialect forms or taboo language and is referred to as over prestige.

Contrastively, when someone does not want to cooperate or make an effort in terms of their conversation(s). Giles et al calls this divergence. This means a speaker uses language to disengage themselves from the person they are speaking to in an effort to distance themselves from them.

Turn-taking

Irrespective of the above, a conversation is only a conversation when there is interaction between speakers. This means speakers need to take turns speaking (one speaker at a time). In an essay, Sacks et al write that there are three indisputable facts about conversation:

1. Speakers take turns speaking, generally speaking one at a time.
   
2. If there are overlaps, they are usually brief.
3. Turns are usually determined by silence, a slight gap or an overlap.
   
4. Speakers do not prearrange who is going to speak when and for how long.
   
5. A speaking turn may range from a few words to several sentences.
   

Sacks et al also refer to the moment the next speaker might start speaking as transition relevance place (TRP). This can be identified with questions which usually require an answer, or question tags that also might signal the end of a turn. Additionally, you might also allocate the next speaker by using vocatives (nouns used to identify a person being addressed) or self-select (deciding when it's your turn to talk).

References

Giles, H., & Powesland, P. (1997). Accommodation theory. In Sociolinguistics (pp. 232-239). Palgrave, London.

Goffman, E. (1955). "On Face-Work". Psychiatry. 18(3): 213–231

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Speech acts (pp. 41-58). Brill.

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1978). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation. In Studies in organization of conversational interaction (pp. 7-55). Academic Press.