Most of the important characteristics of telephone conversation are of course exactly the same as those of conversation which takes place face to face. There are, however, a number of differences which result from the medium of communication and the restrictions which it imposes. Conversationalists who can see each other are able to place a great amount of reliance on the facilities offered by such things as gesture and the presence of a common extra-linguistic context, to help in communication and the resolution of ambiguity. Telephone conversation, however, lacks these facilities to a large extent and so has a tendency to become rather more explicit than ordinary conversation.

The need for greater explicitness is further increased by the fact that sounds carried by telephone lines become diminished in their qualities of distinctiveness, and many of the small cues which help to maintain ready understanding may get distorted or lost. Thus there is more uncertainty in keeping up the give and take between participants which is so noticeable a part of face to face conversation. Utterances that are unduly long will be avoided and a speaker will tend to leave frequent pauses for his partner to say something and prove that he is still there.

Then, perhaps more often than in ordinary conversation, in telephone conversation there tends to be a set theme — people do not phone each other accidentally in the way that they may meet in the street and the information which is exchanged probably tends to be related more to a single identifiable purpose.

Finally, the highly formulaic nature of both the opening and closing of a telephone conversation may be noted — the range of accepted linguistic devices for carrying out these operations is relatively small as compared with conversation in general, the predictability of what is likely to be said at those points is probably considerably higher and the stylistic distinctiveness of what takes place is at times extremely marked.