Analysing spoken language (Section A): the features of speech (prosodics, fillers, pauses, overlaps, turn-taking, adjacency pairs, repair) and the theories of conversation, applied to a transcript.

What this dot point is asking

Unit 4 Section A ("Analysing spoken language") gives you a transcript of real talk and asks you to analyse how spoken language is used. Speech is not just writing said aloud: it is spontaneous, interactive and governed by its own features and conventions. This page covers the features of speech you analyse, the conversation theory that explains them, and how to read transcript notation, all framed by the speakers' context, relationships and purposes.

The answer

Speech is its own mode

Prosodics and non-fluency features

Turn-taking and interaction

Conversation theory

Power and rapport in talk

Spoken interaction is where power and rapport are negotiated moment by moment. Watch who controls topic and turn, who interrupts, who uses face-threatening acts and who softens them, and how status (a teacher and a pupil, an interviewer and an interviewee) shapes the exchange. The Unit 2 concepts of instrumental and influential power apply directly to conversation.

How Section A is assessed

Section A rewards AO1 (terminology for speech features), AO2 (concepts and theories of spoken interaction) and analysis tied to the transcript and context. The discriminator is interpretation: weaker answers label features, while top answers explain what the features reveal about the speakers' relationships, power and purposes.

Examples in context

Model paragraph (analysing a transcript of friends talking). The transcript shows relaxed, cooperative talk between equals, and its spoken features construct that relationship. Turn-taking is mostly smooth, with speakers coming in at transition-relevance places, and where overlaps occur they read as supportive rather than competitive, one speaker completing another's utterance, which signals closeness and shared understanding. The non-fluency features are not failures of competence but the normal texture of spontaneous speech: a voiced filler ("erm") holds a turn while the speaker plans, and a brief self-repair shows real-time monitoring. Pragmatically, the speakers flout Grice's maxim of quantity with in-jokes and ellipsis, relying on shared knowledge so that an apparently underinformative remark carries rich implicature for the group, which itself marks intimacy. Politeness is largely positive, with agreement tokens and laughter building solidarity and little need for negative-politeness hedging because there is little face to threaten among friends. Read together, the features show talk doing relational work: the conversation is less about exchanging information than about performing and maintaining a friendship.

Try this

Q1. What is an adjacency pair? Give an example. [2 marks]

• Cue. A paired exchange where the first part expects the second; for example a question followed by an answer, or a greeting returned.

Q2. State two of Grice's maxims. [2 marks]

• Cue. Any two of quantity (the right amount of information), quality (truthfulness), relation (relevance) and manner (clarity).

Q3. Analyse how spoken language is used in the transcript, referring to features of speech and context. [20 marks]

• What the marker wants. Accurate reading of the transcript, analysis of prosodics, non-fluency and interactional features, conversation theory applied, and a judgement on the speakers' relationship and power.