17. Structural Peculiarities of the Literary-Colloquial style.

The style of informal, friendly oral communication is called colloquial. The vocabulary of colloquial style is usually lower than that of the formal or neutral styles, it is often emotionally coloured and characterised by connotations (consider the endearing connotations in the words daddy, kid or the evaluating components in trash).

Compositional features:

a) Can be used in written and spoken varieties: dialogue, monologue, personal letters, diaries, essays, articles, etc.

b) Prepared types of texts may have logical composi­tion, determined by conventional forms (letters, presentations, articles, interviews).

c) Spontaneous types have a loose structure, relative coherence and uniformity of form and content.

Syntactical features

Use of simple sentences with a number of participial and infinitive constructions and numerous parentheses.

Syntactically correct utterances compliant with the literary norm.

Use of various types of syntactical compression, simplicity of syntac­tical connection.

Use of grammar forms for emphatic purposes, e. g. progressive verb forms to express emotions of irritation, anger etc.

Decomposition and ellipsis of sentences in a dialogue (easily recon­structed from the context).

Use of special colloquial phrases, e.g. that friend of yours.

18. Familiar Colloquial Style. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.

Besides the standard, literary-colloquial speech, there is also a non-standard, or substandard, speech style, mostly represented by a special vocabulary. Such is the familiar-colloquial style used in very free, friendly, informal situations of communication – between close friends, members of one family, etc. Here we find emotionally coloured words, low-colloquial vocabulary and slang words. This style admits also of the use of rude and vulgar vocabulary, including expletives (obscene words / four-letter words / swear words): rot / trash / stuff (= smth. bad); the cat’s pyjamas (= just the right / suitable thing); bread-basket (= stomach); tipsy / under the influence / under the table / has had a drop (= drunk); cute /great! (Am.) (= very good); wet blanket (= uninteresting person); hot stuff! (= smth. extremely good);

Familiar colloquial style is represented in spoken variety.

Phonetic features:

a) Casual and often careless pronunciation, use of deviant forms, e. g. gonna instead of going to, whatcha instead of what do you, dunno instead of don't know.

b) Use of reduced and contracted forms, e.g. you're, they've, I'd.

c) Omission of unaccented elements due to quick tempo ( you hear me?)

d) Emphasis on intonation as a powerful semantic and stylistic instru­ment capable to render subtle nuances of thought and feeling.

e) Use of onomatopoeic words, e. g. hush, stop yodeling (йодль, манера исполнения тирольцев).

Morphological features:

a) Use of evaluative suffixes, nonce words formed on morphological and phonetic analogy with other nominal words: e.g. baldish, mawkish, moody, hanky-panky, helter-skelter.

b) Extensive use of collocations and phrasal verbs instead of neutral and literary equivalents: e. g. to turn in instead of to go to bed.

Syntactical features:

a) Use of simple short sentences.

b) Dialogues are usually of the question-answer type.

c) Use of echo questions, parallel structures, repetitions of various kinds.

d) In complex sentences asyndetic coordination is the norm.

e) Coordination is used more often than subordination, repeated use of conjunction and is a sign of spontaneity rather than an expressive device.

f) Extensive use of ellipsis, including the subject of the sentence e. g. Can't say anything.

g) Extensive use of syntactic tautology, e.g. That girl, she was something else!

h) Abundance of gap-fillers and parenthetical elements, such as sure, indeed, to be more exact, okay, well.

Lexical features:

a) Combination of neutral, familiar and low colloquial vocabulary, including slang, vulgar and taboo words.

b) Extensive use of words of general meaning, specified in meaning by the situation guy, job, get, do, fix, affair.

c) Limited vocabulary resources use of the same word in different meanings it may not possess, e. g. 'some' meaning good: some guy! some game! 'nice' meaning impressive, fascinating, high quality: nice music.

d) Abundance of specific colloquial interjections: boy, wow, hey, there, ahoy.

e) Use of hyperbole, epithets, evaluative vocabulary, trite metaphors and simile, e.g. if you say it once more I'll kill you, as old as the hills, horrid, awesome (horrid), etc.

f) Tautological substitution of personal pronouns and names by other nouns, e. g. you-baby, Johnny-boy.

g) Mixture of curse words and euphemisms, e. g. damn, dash, darned.

Compositional features:

a) Use of deviant language on all levels.

b) Strong emotional colouring.

c) Loose syntactical organization of an utterance.