George Yule

After a description of the features of spoken English, this text considers how they differ from the features of written language. The text describes practical techniques for teaching listening comprehension and speaking, which apply to ESL and foreign languages as well as English. Meer

Referential communication is the term given to communicative acts, generally spoken, in which some kind of information is exchanged between one speaker and another. Meer

General extenders are phrases like 'or something', 'and everything', 'and things (like that)', 'and stuff (like that)', and 'and so on'. Although they are an everyday feature of spoken language, are crucial in successful interpersonal communication, and have multiple functions in discourse, they have so far gone virtually unnoticed in linguistics. Meer

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. Meer