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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2018

Should 'uh' and 'um' be categorized as markers of disfluency? The use of fillers in a challenging conversational context

Résumé

This paper examines the use of 'uh' and 'um' in spontaneous speech. 'Uh' and 'um' have traditionally been labeled as markers of disfluency, and in question-answering, they are commonly said to reflect uncertainty, due to the unfamiliarity or difficulty of the questions. Our proposal is that fillers do not necessarily reflect difficulty and speech disruption. Our study consists of an experiment in which participants were asked questions about a film in a conversational setting. After the experiment, participants were invited to rate the "difficulty" of the questions they had been asked. Findings indicate that they did not often produce fillers when they found the questions "difficult" as little relation between the rate of fillers and the perceived difficulty of the questions was found. Fillers mainly occurred in initial position and served planning functions. This confirms (Tottie 2011) that fillers are predominantly used to buy time in conversation and reflect planning processes.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-02360614 , version 1 (12-11-2019)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02360614 , version 1

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Loulou Kosmala, Aliyah Morgenstern. Should 'uh' and 'um' be categorized as markers of disfluency? The use of fillers in a challenging conversational context. Fluency and Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties, 2018. ⟨hal-02360614⟩
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