How do characters present themselves?

The most important element of characterization in fiction for me has always been the way that character's talk and present themselves. By looking at a way a character talks you are able to acquire the ticks that naturally happen in their speech, and you see the person that they present to the world around them. Speech can often be misleading, the stereotypical bully that lashes out in school, but acts like his victims at home where his parent becomes the abuser. This shows something about the inner character that the figure is presenting. In "Where are you going, where have you been" the aggressor who shows up on the girl's doorstep presents himself by talking about her family in a very intimate way. He chooses to portray himself as some sort of omniscient demonic being by describing "exactly what her family is doing at that very moment" (paraphrasing there) and this presents him in the way he wants to seem to her: all-powerful. In the next few lines however, he reveals himself as a pretender when she begins to ask for more intimate details. A charlatan who simply allows her to fill in the details herself and then proceeds to take credit for it so that he seems as if he is some otherworldly power. When a character speaks they are crafting for the reader a face that we can attempt to verify for our own purposes.