FEATURES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE QUIZ – a 10 minute terminology test

1. ‘Three men in a pub’ and ‘Goin’ to the party?’ are examples of:
(a) elision
(b) dialect
(c) ellipsis

2. ‘Er’, ‘um’, ‘you know’ are examples of:

(a) prosodic features
(b) fillers
(c) tag questions

3. ‘Idiolect’ is:
(a) the language of fools
(b) an individually distinctive style of speaking
(c) a collective idiomatic phrase

4. ‘Sort of’, ‘like’, ‘and so on’, ‘or whatever’, ‘kind of thing’ are examples of:
(a) vague language
(b) voiced pauses
(c) accent

5. ‘Back-channelling’ is:
(a) repeating the other talker’s words
(b) an intrusive medical procedure
(c) listener feedback signalling support or understanding

6. ‘Deixis’ is:
(a) words which point to something ‘outside’ the text
(b) a word which signals a change of subject
(c) often misspelt

7. Pitch, pace, stress and rhythm are examples of:

(a) paralinguistic features
(b) accent
(c) prosodic features

8. ‘Gonna’, ‘gimme’ and ‘loadsa’ are examples of:

(a) synonyms
(b) elision
(c) phatic talk

9. ‘We was going down the road’ and ‘He didn’t know nothing’ are examples of:
(a) non-standard grammar
(b) poor English
(c) transactional language

10. Hesitation, repetition, false starts are examples of:

(a) paralinguistic features
(b) interactional language
(c) non-fluency features

11. Question–answer and greeting–return greeting are examples of:

(a) paralinguistic features
(b) transactional language
(c) adjacency pairs

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 FEATURES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE QUIZ – a 10 minute terminology test

12. Phatic talk is:

(a) stressed or highly intonated words
(b) conversation between the seriously obese
(c) small talk
(d) the native tongue of Phatland

13. Which of the following is not one of Grice’s Maxims [conversational rules]:
(a) politeness
(b) quantity
(c) relevance
(d) manner
(e) quality

14. ‘It’s ok here, isn’t it?’ and ‘That’s cheap, don’t you think?’ are examples of:
(a) sibilance
(b) tag questions
(c) ellipsis

15. Gestures and facial expressions are examples of:

(a) prosodic features
(b) paralinguistic features
(c) hypercorrection
(d) a fidgety nature

16. ‘Anyway’, ‘so’, ‘next thing’ are likely to be examples of:

(a) discourse markers
(b) unvoiced pauses
(c) colloquial language
(d) a limited vocabulary

17. A set of distinctive pronunciations that mark regional or social identity is a definition of:
(a) dialect
(b) accent
(c) semantic field
(d) estuary English

18. Deborah Tannen called the tendency to offer supportive interruptions in all-female
conversations:
(a) co-operative overlap
(b) hedging
(c) hypercorrection
(d) a girly thing

19. Pragmatics is the study of:

(a) conversations involving the request for goods or services
(b) dialect terms
(c) what a speaker means rather than simply the words they say

20. Rather than use the term sentence in describing a stretch of spoken language, we should say:
(a) turn taking
(b) utterance
(c) chit chat
(d) discourse marker
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 FEATURES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE QUIZ – a 10 minute terminology test

Note of caution – Remember this test cannot take account of context – so always study
transcripts of spoken data with an open mind rather than mechanically applying labels [e.g.
repetition may not simply be a non-fluency feature – everyday speakers can use it for
emphasis or some other effect as much as Shakespeare or Dickens in a literary piece]

The answers are

1 c 2 b 3 b 4 a 5 c

6 a 7 c 8 b 9 a 10 c

11 c 12 c 13 a 14 b 15 b

16 a 17 b 18 a 19 c 20 b

© 2002 www.teachit.co.uk spoklang.doc 3