spoken texts

  • power

  • genre conventions

  • audience, purpose, context

  • speaking positioning to a) audience and b) subject (synthetic personalisation- parasocial relationship; or making audience feel more important) (positioning themselves as expert or as every man)

  • extemporaneous or scripted?

  • spoken language features

TERMINOLOGY OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE

transactional language- interaction due to achieve an end for one part (i.e in a shop)

question tag- a phrase or word added to the end of a statement to make it into a question

elliptical sentence- a sentence that misses out words without losing meaning(like sometimes a usually dropping auxiliary verbs)

phatic language- communication that serves a social function, such as social pleasantries that don’t seek or offer information off intrinsic value but can signal willingness to observe conventional local expectations for poltieness

adjacency pairs- composed of two utterances by two speakers, one after the other. the speaking of the first utterance (the first-pair part, or the first turn) provokes a responding utterance (the second-pair part, or the second turn) can be preferred or dispreferred (by negation or non-sequitur)

non fluency features- fillers, repair/ reformulation, voiced pauses

speaker support/back channelling (yeah, I see)

monitors (do you know what I mean/you see?) and tags (innit)

quotation expression (I was like “show me” ; and then she said “x”)

hedges (sort of, kind of)

generate extenders (and stuff; and all that)

discourse markers (right, so, ok)

GENRE CONVENTIONS

PODCAST- informal register, varieties in tone and intonation, and possible interruptions; transactional, referential language use, including turn-taking; use of question types (interrogative, rhetorical, tag) and adjacency pairing, as well as the use of questions to dominate or control the discussion; semantic fields which are subject-specific and relate to the themes

INTERVIEW- a range of question and answer structures, including a variety of question types, e.g tag, rhetorical (perhaps to frame the answer in a particular way), open questions, extended etc; adjacency pairs- as distinct from question and answer structures- and so responded to in terms of (perhaps even to form) discourse markers within the conversation); spontaneous/semi spontaneous language features, e.g repition, interruptions or overlapping, false starts, pauses repairs, and so on; rhetorical devices to engage with the audience, often to establish or develop rapport between the interviewer and interviewee, including the use of humour.

RADIO DRAMA/SCREENPLAY- use of sound effects or aura signposting, e.g F/X (typing) for setting the opening of a scene and as transaction points, including fades in and out; use of music: for example to indicate mood, change of scenery and other settings, or to open or close individual scenes or the play; use of quotation from the work, mixture of registers

SPEECH- use of repetition to emphasise or refer back to a previous point; use of figurative language, metaphor, simile to engage the audience, explain or enhance points, or to entertain or provide imagery; changes in use of address (pronouns) to promote inclusivity, e.g shifts in “I, we, us, you”; use of discourse markers to develop the line of the argument , including verbal signposting to return to or emphasise points, or to bring sections to an end