Familiar colloquial style

Represented in spoken variety.

Phonetic features

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.

Use of reduced and contracted forms, e.g. you're, they've, Pd.

Omission of unaccented elements due to quick tempo, e.g. you hear me?

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

Use of onomatopoeic words, e.g. whoosh, hush, stop yodelling, yum, yak.

Morphological features

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, plates of meet (feet), okeydoke.

Syntactical features

Use of simple short sentences.

Dialogues are usually of the question-answer type.

4.5. Distinctive linguistic features of the major functional styles

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

In complex sentences asyndetic coordination is the norm.

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

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

Extensive use of syntactic tautology, e. g. 77га/ girl, she was something else!

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

Lexical features

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

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

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.

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

Chapter 4. The Theory of Functional Styles

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, etc.

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

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

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

Compositional features

Use of deviant language on all levels.

Strong emotional colouring.

Loose syntactical organisation of an utterance.

Frequently little coherence or adherence to the topic.

No special compositional patterns.

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