Language Registers and Communicative Situations

The communicative situation is the set of circumstances in which communication takes place. These elements are:

• Personality of transmitter and receiver
• Degree of formality
• Topic of communication
• Intentionality
• Interaction type
• Scope of social interaction

Language Registers

It is the individual use of language. It reflects the ability of people to adapt their language style based on their proficiency: the higher the degree and level of language, the easier it will be to change their style. There are two types of registers:

1. Formal register: Used in specialized fields and employs standard usage. The formal register is the standard register.
2. Informal register: Used in family and friendship settings. The most significant is the colloquial register.

The Colloquial Register

It is often confused with popular language. It is defined by two criteria: sociocultural context and communicative situation. Its features include:

• Dialogical character: Sender and receiver are physically present and alternate roles.
• Spontaneity and informality: Spontaneous use of language.
• Confluence of verbal and nonverbal codes: Communication relies on non-linguistic cues.

Features of the Colloquial Register

Phonic Aspects

Features relaxed sounds:

• Reduced diphthongs
• Consonant cluster reduction
• Yeísmo
• Phoneme loss

Treatment

Refers to how one person addresses another:

• Pronominal forms of address
• Nominal forms of address
• Affectionate expressions
• Comparisons alluding to the animal world
• Insults that emphasize physical traits or defects
• Courtesies

Expressiveness

The subjectivity of the speaker is reflected in the following aspects:

1. Expanded sentence modality
2. Subjective organization of the message: Discourse follows the speaker's thoughts and feelings, leading to features like:
   • Syntactic dislocation: Sentence elements are ordered according to the speaker's focus.
   • Syntactic condensation: Reflected in the use of single-word or short expressions.
3. Emphasis through self-affirming linguistic expressions. These elements include:
   • Use of superlatives with nouns
   • Semantic impropriety
   • Semantic redundancy
   • Semantic incompatibility
   • Gender change
4. Spontaneous lexical creations: New words or phrases appearing in conversation.

Economy and Convenience

Speakers aim for efficient communication with minimal effort, sometimes leading to less formal adherence. Some features are:

• Regressive formations
• Spontaneous constructions
• Fillers
• Cliches, stereotyped expressions, proverbs
• General terms