Description for a verbal tic that is vernacular among young people in the U.S

Question

Among teenagers in the U.S., there is currently popular a colloquial way of wrapping up a story:

bla bla, bla bla (various sentences), so yeah.

The "so yeah" signals that the person is done talking.

I need a term or a phrase to describe this, but more succinctly than I just did.

What follows is optional reading:

(Reason I need this: there is a transcript of hearing, with many typos. In this case, the transcript did not have a typo. But I am responding to a document in which the author assumed "yeah" was actually a typo, and turned it into "year" in her block quote. From there, she went on to spin a whole argument based this faulty interpretation. I was present when the young person was speaking, know him quite well, and am 100% certain he said "yeah," not "year." My reader will believe me -- that's not a problem -- but space is an issue in what I'm writing.)

Edit:

I made a mistake. It wasn't "so yeah," it was "and yeah."

Edit #2: the argument the author spun, and her version of the testimony:

The student himself agreed that the transfer to School #2 disrupted his school year and negatively impacted his educational performance:

"They're not synched, and so I either have to relearn something or I miss something completely because they weren't taught at -- like, it wasn't taught yet at School #1, but it was already taught at School #2, so I miss a unit, and year."

Answer 1

Here is some data to show the usage of "and yeah" as well as "so yeah". I do agree with your conclusion that the speaker in context would most probably have used the above, as opposed to year.

Anecdotally, such phrases are actually common amongst a variety of languages and not just the US. I digress.

These phrases can be called fillers. Fillers are used in informal registers. In informal registers, it is common for speakers to use informal language such as so yeah / and yeah. There isn't a clear-cut agreed upon way to determine the formality of a register but we can look at a few things. Here is just a VERY simplified list:

• The relationship of the participants (boss & worker vs boyfriend & girlfriend)
• The purpose of the discourse (to outline work objectives vs to determine what to eat)
• The phonetic & syntactic deviation from prescriptive language conventions (pronounciation of words, speaking "style")
• Vocabulary used (technical vs colloquial)

Concluding, depending on the context of what you wish you write (and the degree in which you are space limited) one should be easily able to link the informality of the register to your more probable interpretation of the inaudible being a filler EG:

The informality of the register lends the inaudible word to most probably be a filler, and as such is reflected in the transcript.

Paraphrase as needed. Depending on space limitations one may also want to establish the level of formality of the register (such as through using the above points I mentioned) and then link that to the most probable outcome based on this.

Hope I helped.

Answer 2

You could say:

And he signed off with "So, yeah."

This is a common idiom for indicating being done with whatever one was doing.

2. Fig. to quit doing what one has been doing and leave, go to bed, quit trying to do something, etc.
I have to sign off and get to bed. See you all.
When you finally sign off tonight, please turn out all the lights.
_{The Free Dictionary by FARLAX}

I was originally thinking you treat this like a closing/valediction, such as the Regards or similar that goes at the end of a letter.

There is also the notion of procedure words that are used to signal when one is done talking. But those words are fairly well defined, since it is actually used in voice transmission protocols (e.g., CB radio).

Answer 3

I'd suggest that he used 'and yeah' as a 'verbal terminal punctuation' or possibly a 'weak verbal terminal punctuation'. While the full phrase does not garner any hits on google, 'terminal punctuation' is a clear enough concept that few readers should struggle with extrapolating the function to that kind of verbal filler.

Terminal punctuation refers to the punctuation marks used to identify the end of a portion of text. Terminal punctuation marks are also referred to as end marks1 and stops.[2] In languages using the ISO basic Latin alphabet, terminal punctuation marks are defined as the period, the question mark, and the exclamation mark.[3][4] These punctuation marks may bring sentences to a close. In their widest sense, terminal punctuation marks bring any element of written text to a close