• Isolated (independent) utterances may consist of one word, sometimes even a form-word, e.G. A conjunction:

"I took a good look around that room." "And?"

"Not even a paintbrush in sight!" (Brown)

• The most obvious (and the best known) form of implication is ellipsis. A predicate may be left out only if it is restorable from the context.

Explication predominates over implication in colloquial English reflected in modern realistic literature..

Both time-limit and stylistic "irresponsibility" of people talking in­formally make very frequent such cases when the speaker begins an utterance without having a clear-cut communicative intention. What we observe is excessive number of quasi-independent communicative units — several fragmentary utterances in place of one well-balanced. This practice is often referred to as 'parcelling'. It may be accompanied by all kinds of positional changes. So, a phrase in apposition to a pronoun in the first half of the sentence may appear at the very end of it, preceded by a pause (period):

"I think she's divorcing him, but it takes time. Fine little crea­ture." (Galsworthy)

The psychological antipode of parcelling is what might be called deciphering'

The speaker's first utterance follows a subject-predicate pattern, using pronouns and pro-verbs, after which the pattern is filled in with notional words; the preliminary 'pronominal' signal, the skeleton of the sentence is fleshed out with notional, meaningful units:

"So he did it after all, I mean Dick got that compensation." (McBain)

Structurally quite different, but engendered by a similar state of mind are constructions in which the 'theme' ('topic') follows the 'rheme' ('comment') which the speaker hastens to announce first:

"Awfully jolly letters, she wrote!" (Christie)

Explication is further observed in colloquial monologues whenever a speaker reveals a propensity for asking questions and immediately answering them:

"Who's ignoring it? Nobody's ignoring it!" (Salinger)

"And who keeps taking my invoices out of that vase? Somebody bloody does." (Waterhouse and Hall)

The most obvious manifestations of explication are excessive words. Here belong, first of all, the various kinds of repetition — emphatic re­currence of sentences, phrases, and words.

"True, true. Quite true, Harry." (Shaw)

See also redundant use of pronouns:

"Good idea that, what?" (Shaw)

"There you are, you old devil, you!" (Osborne)

Of little informative force (although stylistically significant) are

1. interjections signalizing (or emphasizing) the interrogative aim of the utterance;

2. expletives;

3. parenthetic elements with the general meaning of certainty;

4. the so-called 'appended statements'.

A. "We go together, huh?" (Innes)

"Benediction on murder, um?" (Galsworthy )

"Masterly stroke of policy that, my dear sir, eh?" (Shaw)

B. "What the hell is wrong with you?" (Brown)

"How the bloody hell can he go to London?" (Waterhouse and Hall)

C. "Yes, really, I've seen it, sure."

D. "I know what the like of you are, I do." (Shaw)

"He was the perfect diplomat, was Uncle Cuffs." (Galsworthy )

Semantics. Speech activity in everyday intercourse is not an aim in itself, but only a means of coordinating and regulating the requirements of life. In the colloquial sphere, there is no striving after ornamentality that imparts a special intellectual and aesthetic value to speech. Deviations from this general rule, i.e. a play on words or fresh tropes, actually met with in non-official situations turns the lingual behaviour into a momentary creative act. The most important feature of the colloquial sphere is neglect of formal requirements, inattention to matters of style (except perhaps more or less conscious hunting after overstatements — unrestrained, exaggerated expression of ordinary feelings, both pleasant and otherwise).

Specifically colloquial tropes must answer these two demands:

1) in contradistinction to cases like hand of a watch, foot of a hill, neck ')/ a bottle, the transfer must still be felt, i.e. must have some impressive (image-creating) force;

2) opposed to individual creations by writers (or by the above-men­tioned extraordinary wits), the trope or figure should not be a new-coined one; it is to be familiar, its colloquial nature should also be known (the foreign learner of English will find the corresponding stylistic labels in dictionaries, which can discuss only what is already current).

Metonymy "He never laid eyes on her before", face

Hyperbole thousands of times; Thanks a million, as fine as a frog's hair split

Meiosis (litotes) pretty penny, quite a few times, not half (so) bad, tolerably well

Periphrasis"He's behaving like a perfect I don't know what."

Metaphor zoosemic or phytosemic nature, used as anthroponyms or characterizing a person's behaviour, appearance, etc.: brute, beast, swine, dog, bitch, sonofabitch, henpecked (terrorized or governed by one's wife), to ferret out ('to find out'), fishy ('suspicious'), etc.

Irony and Onomatopeia