Colloquial Style
Functions

- provides information

- communicates
Forms

- primarily spoken
Substyles

- slang; dialect; jargon

- professionalisms; vulgarisms
General Characteristics

- informal, familiar, conversational

- paralinguistic context, non-verbal communication
Phonetic Features

- careless pronunciation /‘feller’ for ‘fellow’; ‘dunno’ for ‘don’t know’; ‘attaboy’ for ‘that’s a boy’/

- reduction, elision

- faster speech pace

- various noises (cough, rasp, chuck)
Morphological Features

- contractions /also ‘wanna; dunno; cuppa’/
Syntactical Features

- specific structures

- active rather than passive structures

- frequent conjunction ‘and’

- ellipsis, dropping of pronominal subject /‘Wanna tea?’/
Lexical Features

- specific vocabulary

- short and simple words

- words of Germanic origin rather than of Latin origin

- word with emotional meaning: familiar forms of address, vulgarisms, evaluating adjectives

- discourse markers = fillers /‘kind of, sort of, like, actually, you know, well’/

- parenthetical elements /‘indeed; sure; no doubt; obviously; perhaps; maybe’/

- idiosyncratic expressions characteristic of a particular speaker

- onomatopoeic words /‘drip drop; bow wow; splash’/

- nonce words = colloquial coinages: spontaneous attributing of new meanings to already existing words; elusive and readily disappearing from the language again

- interjections /‘oh my, gee, yeah’/

- phraseology, idioms
Special Nomenclature

- fashion terminology: a streetwise head-turner; fleeting flashbulb moments; a red-carpet goddess

- idioms: an armchair critic; a back-seat driver; an empty nester; too many chiefs and not enough Indians; keep a dog and bark yourself; give someone the hairy eyeball; chalk and talk; fit to be tied