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Self Addressed Questions and Filled Pauses: A Cross-linguistic Investigation

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Abstract

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree (Cognition 84(1):73–111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the distribution of self-addressed-questions or SAQs (such as “what’s the word”) in relation to filled pauses. We found that SAQs address different problems in different languages (most frequently about memory-retrieval in English and Chinese, and about appropriateness in Japanese). In relation to filled pauses, British but not American English uses “um” to signal a more severe problem than “uh”. Chinese uses different filled pauses to signal the syntactic category of the problem constituent. Japanese uses different filled pauses to signal levels of interaction with the interlocuter. Overall, our data supports the Filler-As-Words hypothesis that filled pauses are used communicatively. However, the dimensions of its meanings vary across languages and dialects.

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Notes

  1. The term own communication management for what is also often called ‘self repair’ is due to Jens Allwood, see e.g., Allwood et al. (2005) for discussion.

  2. In this paper we do not discuss non-disfluent utterances describing a state of self-oriented query, such as “I wonder when my mum will give me call”.

  3. For a detailed discussion of the distribution of such hesitation markers in Germanic languages with variation across different populations, see Wieling et al. (2016).

  4. Korean and Spanish also have demonstratives filled pauses (Brody 1987; Hayashi and Yoon 2010).

  5. These five corpora cover a time span of 18 years, which means that results suggesting cross-linguistic differences might potentially be due to language change. However, as the number of spontaneous speech corpora is limited, we could not find data from all target dialects and language matched in time period. Also, there are minor differences in the analyses across corpora due to the differences in annotation.

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Funding

This study was funded by the French Investissements d’Avenir–Labex EFL program (ANR-10-LABX-0083) and by the Disfluences, Exclamations, and Laughter in Dialogue (DUEL) project within the Projets Franco-Allemand en sciences humaines et sociales of the Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche ForschungGemeinschaft (DFG), Grant Number ANR-13-FRAL-0001-01. Ginzburg is also supported by a senior member fellowship from the Institut Universitaire de France.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de linguistique formelle, UMR 7110, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France

    Ye Tian & Jonathan Ginzburg

  2. Faculty of Letters, Senshu University, Kanagawa, Japan

    Takehiko Maruyama

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  1. Ye Tian
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  2. Takehiko Maruyama
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  3. Jonathan Ginzburg
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Correspondence to Ye Tian.

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We would like to acknowledge research funding from Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France.

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Tian, Y., Maruyama, T. & Ginzburg, J. Self Addressed Questions and Filled Pauses: A Cross-linguistic Investigation. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 905–922 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9468-5

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