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Lecture 6. Conversational (Familiar) Style

Conversational Style is the most commonly used type of intonational style and
consequently a variety which is more familiar to the majority of English-speaking people
than any other. That is why it is called familiar.
This kind of English is also a means for everyday communication, so it is also
called conversational. Some scholars also call it informal, because this style occurs
mainly in informal relationships in the speech of relatives, friends, well-acquainted
people and so on. In such cases it is the emotional reaction to a situational or verbal
stimulus that matters, that’s why the attitudinal function of intonation here comes to the
fore. Nevertheless intellectual and volitional intonation patterns may also take place.
This style has variations in the use of non-standard norms due to the social
background.
This English seems to be one of the most useful and least artificial kinds of the
language to teach foreign learners.
Spontaneous, colloquial, informal conversations display certain COMMON
LINGUISTIC CHARACTERISTICS.
1. Incompleteness of many utterances This style is characterized by inexplicitness
(неясностью, двусмысленностью) of the language as the speakers rely on other features
than language - extralinguistic factors — context, kinesics, etc. Sometimes a lift of an
eyebrow, a twitch at the side of the mouth, or a silence tell us more than a dozen
sentences. They also rely and a great deal on what is NOT said. Sometimes the speakers
even abrupt the speech suddenly and tail off into silence but the listeners understand
them. The context makes it clear what was meant by the speaker, thus making redundant
its vocal expression:
Jane: Well... maybe, but... take responsibility; the... the... you don't need as great a
sense of responsibility for you... your kind of work as you do in teaching — all those
children, all those parents...
2. Recapitulation by all sorts of repeated and echoing questions (Richard: Well,
I'm going tonight in fact. Jane: Tonight? Oh, are you? Richard: Yes, most nights really.)
3. Lack of planning and the randomness (произвольность, случайность) of
subject matter. They are very often unpredictable. This results in errors involving
hesitation features of all kinds, frequent switches in modality, incompleteness of many
utterances, slips of the tongue and all sorts of overlapping (наложение) and simultaneous
speech:
Bob: I think I'd much prefer to go in for teaching.
Jane: Jolly good! (simultaneously)
Bob: Because ... er ... well, you get long holidays.
4. Due to the mentioned above, another general feature of the style is "non-
fluency".
5. The most noticeable aspect of informal conversation is its vocabulary. Words
tend to be simple in structure, specialized terms and phraseology are generally avoided.
The lack of precision in the matter of word selection is not important, any lexical item
may be replaced by words like what-do-you-call-it, you-know-what-I-mean, thingummy
(штуковина).
Also the informality of the text is achieved by the use of words and phrases specific
for such conversations, e.g. Yeah. Right. O.K. I see. Oh dear. Sure. Good heavens! etc.
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Though it is the most changeable variety of colloquial language, in many everyday

communications certain semantic blocks are commonly repeated. Phrases of speech
etiquette function in a stereotyped exchange of greetings, partings, pleasantries
(любезность), making acquaintance, starting the conversation, arresting attention,
making contacts, requesting, agreeing and refusing, expressing gratitude and so on. These
devices and opening gambits (начальная определяющая фраза) are very helpful for
speakers to build up a conversational unity and are used by native speakers mechanically.
For foreign learners, however, they should be taught in an appropriate order to help them
to control and handle the speech.
On the grammatical level
1. There is a problem of delimiting sentences from each other as everyday
conversations are characterized by a large number of loosely coordinated clauses and it is
very difficult to decide whether to take these as sentences or as clauses of compound
sentences. David Crystal suggests referring to such a feature without using the term
"sentence" at all, talking instead of clause complexes.
e.g. Jane: Well,... maybe, but... take responsibility for your kind of work as you do
in teaching — all those children, all those parents...
2. Wide use of parenthetic phrases you see, you know, I mean, I say and others.
3. Frequent use of interrogative sentence types (a great number of question tags),
and very few imperatives.
4. Common use of vocatives, especially in initial position.
5. Rare use of one-member nominal sentences; the personal pronouns are more in
evidence, the informal you is quite common in its impersonal function.
6. The use of all sorts of repetitions and repetition structures. Even adverbial
intensifiers such as very may be repeated several times.
7. The occurrence of contracted verbal forms (he's ).
8. The frequency of colloquial ellipses.

PHONETICS PECULIARITIES
Conversational style often relies on such phonetic means of speech characterization as
phonetic variations (deviation):
- Reduction of vowels and consonants: haven’t, isn’t, you = ye ; fellow = fella, kind of
= kinda, going to = gonna, would you = wudja,
give me a cup of (tea) = gimme a cuppa (characterize negligent fluent speech
- Voicing
- Substitution of sounds: could have been = could ‘əv been; old = ole; and = an’; Henry
=’Enry (cockney); darling = dulin’; everything = eve’thin; somewhat = summut -
complete mispronunciation.
These stylistic devices have different functions. Contracted forms characterize colloquial
speech. Other deviations can be used as a means of the personage’s speech characteristics
– they indicate his/her social status, educational level, characterize him as a carrier of
some dialect or transfer some individual peculiarities of pronunciation (children’s speech,
lisping - шепелявость, burr – картавость). Moreover, phonetic variation can transfer the
personage’s emotional state, the baby talk and so on.

SOME PROSODIC FEATURES

Phonetic features of this style depend on such extralinguistic (situational) factors as
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 personalities of the speakers; attitude of the speakers to each other, realtions

between them (degree of intimacy)
 the chosen subject-matter, background knowledge (general store of
knowledge of the speakers)
 fluency of an individual
 emotional state and so on

1) Intonation groups may be of any length, but they tend to be short. Their
potentially lengthy tone units tend to be broken. These short interpausal units are
characterized by sudden jumps on communicative centres.
2) Since there are no restrictions on the range and depth of emotions displayed in
conversational speech situations, they will allow entire range of prosodic effects, of
intonation patterns in particular. Relatively unexcited conversational situations are
characterized by low pre-heads, falling or stepping heads and simple Low falling or rising
tones. Degrees of increasing intensity of excitement correlate with increased pitch height.
As a result widened pitch patterns are typical of more excited situation.
4) The heads are usually level, or falling. Falling heads occur only in groups
consisting of several stressed syllables. Monosyllabic response utterances display
narrowed pitch patterns and employs the level head.
5) As for the nuclei, simple falling and rising tones are common. Emphatic tones
occur in highly emotional contexts. Here are a high proportion of intonation patterns with
the high falling nuclear tone. The High Fall implies, among other things, the effect of
personal participation or involvement in the situation. There is also the occasional
completely unexpected placement of nuclear tone. Besides, mention should be made of
the high frequency of compound tunes and heterogeneous heads.
6) High pre-nuclear syllables are very frequent.
7) Frequency of silence for purposes of contrastive pause as opposed to its being
required simply for breath-taking.
8) Pauses may occur randomly, not just at places of grammatical junctions. Pauses
are brief and there are cases when intonation groups and sentences are not separated by
any kind of pause.
8) The tempo of colloquial speech is very varied. It is usually quite fast. It depends
on the fluency of a speaker, on his familiarity with the topic being talked about, on his
experience. The natural speed might be very fast but the impression of "slowness" may
appear because of a great number of hesitation pauses both filled and non-filled (hesitant
drawls) within the block.
One of the most essential distinctive features of informal spontaneous conversation is
the occurrence of the entire range of hesitation phenomena.
a) hesitation pauses;
b) hesitation drawls (растягивать слова), lengthening of sounds, syllables and words;
c) repetitions of syllables and words;
d) false starts to words, followed by self-corrections;
e) restarting a construction or a sentence to conform more to what the speaker wants to say;
f) unfinished intonation groups often accompanied by reduced loudness of voice;
g) fillers-in such as well, and, you know, in fact, etc.;
h) random vocalizations and such phonetic oddities (странность, чудаковатось) as clicks
(щелчки), trills (трель, вибрирующее р), intakes of breath.
9) Interpausal stretches have a marked tendency towards subjective rhythmic
isochrony.
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10) Moreover, phonetics of conversation also includes such phenomena as sound

symbolism (e.g. brrr, whoosh), artificial clearing of the throat or coughing for purposes of
irony, various snorts (фыркание) and sniffs to communicate disgust and other attitudes.

Now we shall examine another, very specific register of conversational style —

TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS. This sphere of communication is limited in certain
important respects by the special situation, which imposes a number of restrictions.
- The conversationalists who can see each other are able to rely on gesture and a
common extralinguistic context. In a telephone conversations the participants are not
visible to each other and they can’t rely on extralinguistic context to resolve ambiguities
in speech; so have a tendency to become more explicit than in ordinary conversations.
- They have to spell out words because of the distortion of certain sounds
- The listener is expected to confirm his continued interest and his continued
auditory presence.
- The "talkers" avoid long utterances without introducing pauses.
- Long unfilled pauses cannot be long, because anything approaching a silence may
be interpreted by the listener either as a breakdown of communication (with the resulting
‘Hello?’ or ‘Are you there?’) or as an opportunity for interruption which may not have
been desired.
- Voiced hesitation introduced to fill the gap (drawls, random vocalizations,
repetitions of words) is more frequent here than elsewhere.
- In view of the purpose of a telephone call questions (also repeated and echoed),
responses and imperatives are very common.
- Vocabulary is characterized by the use of colloquialisms, idioms and vocalization.
The opening and closing of a telephone conversation are marked by the use of the same
formulas, the linguistic devices carrying out these operations are not numerous and
always predicted.

Let’s examine one more area of conversations, namely, when partners' stretches of
speech are not equal: one is an active speaker, the other is an active listener. It happens
when people tell stories of anecdotal character or in the form of long narratives. It may be
the story of a film or a book or just a story of events that have happened to us. In this case
the speech of the narrator reminds us very much of the informational monologue, only
differs in the degree of formality.
Correspondingly, there is a greater variety in using hesitation phenomena (filled or
non-filled), vocalizations, repetitions and so on.
The speed of utterances and pausal contrasts vary in accordance with the semantic
value of the narration.
The listener responds either non-verbally by using vocalizations, gestures and facial
expressions or by prompting the talk with all sorts of phrases showing personal concert
and interest, like: What then? So what? And? Well? and so on.