The low-key opening monologue, the jokes about the orchestra leader, the home-base chatter with the announcer sidekick, the kidding with the studio audience, the celebrity interviews all of these were selected for personal convenience but in time came to seem the "natural" talk-show formula.
Gregarious and quick-witted, Mr. Williams was always a natural talk-show guest, and his anecdotes last week enlivened a program in which he applied his agreeable croak of a voice to some of his best-known songs as well as to an obscurity like "Hollywood," a peppy ragtime number written for an unproduced musical about Dorothy Parker.
Also coming after the first of the year are new episodes for some hit television shows, like "Lost" on ABC, as well as new series, like "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" on Fox, whose actors would be natural talk-show guests.
An advanced voice analysis method, capable of dealing with more natural talking, is required for future research.
Sally finds it natural to talk to her mum about her love life: "It's only weird if she starts talking details, but I just say 'Enough!', and my brother puts his hands over his ears".
In New York, it is considered a bit undignified for performers to address the audience, but the members of the St . Lawrencehave found it natural to talk about what they're up to.
"We had known that George shopped our stores and his wife shopped for the other five Georges -- so it was a natural to talk to him," Mr. Levin said.
1. Copp 2003 gives a useful survey of attempts to explicate the "natural" in talk of natural properties and makes an intriguing nonstandard proposal.
Given this and the correspondence between specific nucleotide triplets and specific amino acids, it is very natural to talk of genes as coding for protein synthesis, and even for organismic traits.
In such contexts, it is more natural to talk proposition-language than state-of-affairs-language. It feels odd (wrong) to say that someone believes a state of affairs, or that states of affairs are true or false.
"People chit chat in interviews, and it's natural to talk about things that might give you information that's not job-related, but could be used to discriminate against a person," he said.
