Leary speaks very quickly and uses the intonation of his voice to create comedic affects. He also uses a number of common features of English that we will now take a closer look at.
Let’s look at how Leary uses colloquial discourse markers (little words to tell us how he feels about what he is saying) in his utterances (Äußerungen)
Examples
Common filler words
We know contractions from sentences like, “He’s my best friend” or “I’d like to ask you a question,” where the apostrophe indicates the existence of missing letters. This type of contraction is completely acceptable and an important feature of English.
There are other contractions that are only part of spoken English. They do not use an apostrophe and they often effect multi-word verb structures.
Examples
Note that “gotta” can be the contracted form of “I have got” in the sense of ownership if it is followed by a noun and “I have got to” in the sense of obligation if followed by a verb.
Tag questions are simple question phrases that are put at the end of a sentence to show that the statement is actually a question that is usually asked to confirm a fact.
Example
How to make a tag question.
Find the first verb in the sentence and use that in a short question you put at the end of the sentence.
Because tag questions can sometimes be difficult to form, there are other ways to express this. Leary’s favorite colloquial tag question is “right.”
Example