Abstract
It is a widely known phenomenon that silence among people engaged in dialogue can be awkward. In linguistic terms, the awkward silence could be understood as a silence threshold; a period of time that has to pass silently in dialogue after which any speaker will give in to the urge to contribute anything. Sometimes there will be nothing to contribute, in which case it is assumed that speakers produce linguistic hesitations or produce non-committing, low-content material. Silences are among the most frequent hesitations, along with fillers (uh, uhm). The interplay of silences and fillers can thus be very revealing for linguistic approaches to the awkward silence. In this study, I propose that fillers ground hesitations in dialogue and increase acceptance for subsequent silences. To test this hypothesis, I analyze spontaneous speech data from four languages, with regard to co-occurences of fillers and silences. The hypothesis is that silences are longer when occurring after fillers. The hypothesis is correct for German and English, but cannot be accepted for French and Italian, which suggests that both the concept of the awkward silence as well as general properties of hesitations are subject to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences that demand further attention.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Allwood, J. (1995). Reasons for management in spoken dialogue. NATO ASI SERIES F Computer and Systems Sciences, 142, 241–241.
Allwood, J., Nivre, J., & Ahlsén, E. (1990). Speech management—On the non-written life of speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 13(1), 3–48.
Arnold, J., Kam, C., & Tanenhaus, M. (2007). If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(5), 914.
Arnold, J., Tanenhaus, M., Altmann, R., & Fagnano, M. (2004). The old and thee, uh, new: Disfluency and reference resolution. Psychological science, 15(9), 578–582.
Belz, M., & Trouvain, J. (2019). Are ‘silent’ pauses always silent? In 19. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS).
Betz, S. (2020). Hesitations in spoken dialogue systems. PhD Thesis. Bielefeld University Online Publication.
Betz, S., Bryhadyr, N., Kosmala, L., Schettino, L. (2021, in press). A crosslinguistic study on the interplay of fillers and silences.
Betz, S., Eklund, R., & Wagner, P. (2017). Prolongation in German. In DiSS 2017 The 8th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 18–19 August 2017 (pp. 13–16). KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Betz, S., & Kosmala, L. (2019). Fill the silence! Basics for modeling hesitation. In Proceedings of DiSS 2019. The 9th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech.
Betz, S., & Lopez Gambino, S. (2016). Are we all disfluent in our own special way and should dialogue systems also be? Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2016, 168–174.
Betz, S., Voße, J., Zarrieß, S., & Wagner, P. (2017). Increasing recall of lengthening detection via semi-automatic classification. In Proceedings of Interspeech.
Betz, S., Wagner, P. & Schlangen, D. (2015). Micro-structure of disfluencies: Basics for conversational speech synthesis. In Proceedings of Interspeech.
Betz, S., Zarrieß, S., Székely, É., & Wagner, P. (2019). The Greennn tree-lengthening position influences uncertainty perception. In Proceedings of Interspeech.
Brennan, S., & Schober, M. (2001). How listeners compensate for disfluencies in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 44(2), 274–296.
Campione, E., & Véronis, J. (2002). A large-scale multilingual study of silent pause duration. In Speech prosody 2002, international conference.
Cataldo, V. (2019). Phonetic and functional features of pauses, and concurrent gestures, in tourist guides’ speech. In c. XV Convegno Nazionale AISV Gli archivi sonori al crocevia tra scienze fonetiche, informatica umanistica e patrimonio digitale (Vol. 6, pp. 205–231). Officinaventuno.
Chafe, W. (1980). Some reasons for hesitating. Temporal variables in speech: Studies in Honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler, 169–180.
Clark, H. H., & Schaefer, E. F. (1989). Contributing to discourse. Cognitive science, 13(2), 259–294.
Clark, H. H., & Fox Tree, J. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84(1), 73–111.
Di Napoli, J. (2020). Filled pauses and prolongations in Roman Italian task-oriented dialogue. In Laughter and Other Non-Verbal Vocalisations Workshop: Proceedings (2020).
Eklund, R. (2004). Disfluency in Swedish human–human and human–machine travel booking dialogues (Doctoral dissertation, Linköping University Electronic Press).
Fischer, K., Niebuhr, O., Novák-Tót, E., & Jensen, L. C. (2017). Strahlt die negative Reputation von Häsitationsmarkern auf ihre Sprecher aus. In Proc. 43rd Annual Meeting of the German Acoustical Society (DAGA), Kiel, Germany (pp. 1450–1453).
Fox Tree, J. (1995). The effects of false starts and repetitions on the processing of subsequent words in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 34(6), 709–738.
Götz, S. (2013). Fluency in native and nonnative English speech. (Vol. 53) John Benjamins Publishing.
Hough, J., Tian, Y., de Ruiter, L., Betz, S., Kousidis, S., Schlangen, D. & Ginzburg J. (2016). DUEL: A multi-lingual multimodal dialogue corpus for disfluency, exclamations and laughter. In 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.
Jefferson, G. (1989). Preliminary notes on a possible metric which provides for a ‘standard maximum’ silence of approximately one second in conversation. Conversation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 166–196.
Kosmala, L. (2020). (Dis) fluencies and their contribution to the co-construction of meaning in native and non-native tandem interactions of French and English. TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage (36).
Kosmala, L., & Morgenstern, A. (2019). Should ‘uh’ and ‘um’ be categorized as markers of disfluency? The use of fillers in a challenging conversational context. In Degand, L. et al. Fluency and disfluency across languages and language varieties. Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Levelt, W. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. MIT Press.
Lickley, R. J. (2015). 20 fluency and disfluency. In The handbook of speech production, 445.
Maclay, H., & Osgood, C. (1959). Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous English speech. Word, 15, 19–44.
Morrison, L. (2018). The subtle power of uncomfortable silences. BBC online Article. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170718-the-subtle-power-of-uncomfortable-silences (assessed 07/09/2021).
Savy, R., & Cutugno, F. (2009). Diatopic, diamesic and diaphasic variations in spoken Italian. In Proceedings of the 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference: CL2009 (pp. 20–23).
Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735.
Schettino, L., Betz, S., & Wagner, P. (2021, in press). Hesitation marker distribution in Italian discourse.
Acknowledgements
There is always more than one person involved in the creation of an article. So, thanks to the organizers of the workshop “The Anechoic Chamber”, Bielefeld, Germany, October 1–2, 2020, for the initiative and for inviting me. Thanks to Loredana Schettino and Loulou Kosmala for providing Italian and French datasets. Thanks to Nataliya Bryhadyr for assistance with the annotations.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Betz, S. (2022). Linguistic Considerations on the Awkward Silence. In: Mayar, M., Schulte, M. (eds) Silence and its Derivatives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06523-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06523-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06522-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06523-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)