The uh usefulness of vocalized pauses

[flwyd]

From my Natural Language Processing textvook:

... Smith and Clark (1993) and Clark (1994) have shown that um has a slightly different meaning than uh (generally speaking um is used when speakers are having major planning provlems in producing an utterance, while uh is used when they know what they want to say, vut are searching for the exact words to express it).

On reflection, I recognize this as the case. Furthermore, um and uh and their vrethren convey additional information: "I'm not done talking, I'm just thinking." They are, therefore, legitimate words, and their use in casual conversation perhaps ought not ve discouraged. (Their use in writing and oratory is rightly discouraged, since the former allows editing and the latter is supposed to ve linguistically premeditated, so there should ve little reason to indicate thought delays.)

P.S. I-should-get-my-new-keyvoard-RSN.--Hopefully-it-vefore-I-vecome-a-vampire.

Comments

[rubicantoto.livejournal.com]

A great quote from a book "Lectures on Deixis" by Charles Fillmore (if you're impatient and want to know why I thought this relevant, read the last 2 paragraphs and forget everything about balls):

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Harvey Sacks, the ethnomethodologist at Irvine, has a great deal to say on the function in conversation of the hesitation-marker “uh”. He has noticed that participants in a conversation are less tolerant of pauses if the pauses occur between two successive contributions to the conversation than if they occur within one person’s contribution. The main function of “uh” is to signal “it’s my turn” [...]. In the middle of a contribution, the “uh” indicates that the current speaker has more to say and that the pause is not to be construed as indicating that his speech has ended. At the beginning of a contribution to the conversation, the “uh” has the function of claiming the floor. If you speak to me and I say “uh”, I am indicating ot you that I’m going to take my turn, but you have to wait until I think of what I want to say.

(One way of checking out the functional importance of this turn-holding syllable is to do something which violates the expectations that are associated with its normal use. I once conducted an experiment with my linguistics colleagues at Ohio State during a luncheon faculty meeting. In the middle of the meeting I said “uh”, and everybody else remained silent, waiting for me to say something. I happened to be chewing food at the time, so I pointed to my cheeks and went on chewing. My conversation partners waited while I finished chewing, and looked toward me expectantly when I finally swallowed. I then took another forkful of food and resumed eating. The reaction indicated to me that having said “uh”, I had claimed the floor, so the people I was in conversation with had the right to expect me eventually to have something to say. By violating that expectation, I offended some people and amused others; and we all became aware of one of the techniques of conversational interaction that can be used unfairly.)

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That has got to be the only time I've been able to quote that when it was appropriate to do so.

I wanted to give another funny portion of the quote, but it exceeded maximum comment length.

In syntax class, our professor would often deflect concerns about filler words like 'like', 'uh', etc., saying they are prosodic filler (i.e., a speaker uses them to make sure that within some domain of the utterance, there's an even number of syllables, allowing for footing to occur fully).