Metalanguage review

Prosodic features

Stress, pitch, Intonation, tempo, volume

Connected speech processes

Assimilation, vowel reduction, elision, insertion

phonological patterning

Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance, Rhythm, Rhyme

Morphological patterning

Shortening, abbreviating, affixation, acronym, blending, backformation, compounding, conversion, contractions

Lexical patterning

Neologisms, Nominilisation, borrowings, commonisation

Sentence structure

-          Simple sentences: one coordinating clause.

-          Compound sentences: two coordinating clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction or a semicolon.

-          Complex sentences: one main clause and one or more subordinating clauses.

-          Compound-complex sentences: two or more main clauses and one or more subordinating clauses.

Syntactic patterning

Parallelism, Antithesis, Listing

Cohesion

Conjunctions & adverbials
Lexical choices
Information flow (Clefting - front focus, end focus)
Deixis
Ellipses
Collocation
Substitution
Referencing (Cataphoric (future), Anaphoric (recalling))
Repetition

Coherence

Formatting
Logical ordering
Inference
Cohesion
Conventions
Consistency

Features of spoken discourse

• Openings and closings

• Adjacency pairs

• Overlapping speech (interruptive, collaborative, backchanneling)

• Discourse markers/particles (so, like)

• Non fluency features (Pauses, false starts, interrogatives tags)

Strategies in spoken discourse

• Topic management

• Turn taking (hold, pass, take the floor)

Positive face strategies

• backchanneling

• Exaggeration

• laughter

• in-group language

• agreement

• phatic interrogatives

• compliments

• nicknames/hypocorisms 

Negative face strategies

• Hedging

• Politeness markers (please)

• Interrogatives instead of imperatives

• Low modality modal verbs

• Agentless passives

Semantic patterning

Hyperbole: exaggerated statement

Irony

Personification: inanimate objects emotions or attitudes

Oxymoron: Opposing connotations

Simile

Figurative language: non literal meaning

Lexical ambiguity

Animation: inanimate objects movement

Metaphor

Sense relations

Synonymy: same/similar meaning
Hypernymy: overall term
Hyponymy: term in a specific branch
Collocation
Denotation: dictionary meaning
Connotation: societal meaning

features of informal language

Colloquial language

slang

taboo language

dysphemism’s

Profanity

Emoticons

Non-standard grammar/syntax

features of formal language

Jargon

Nominalization

Hedging

compound, complex sentences

lexical density

agentless passives

Rhetoric’s

Euphemisms

Non-discriminatory language

Double speak