Exploring the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers
The role of gaze and gesture
The present study aims to explore the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers by taking into account their
accompanying visual and gestural behavior. This aspect has not yet been widely explored, and the current study breaks new ground
by demonstrating that the analysis of gaze and gesture can shed substantial light on the pragmatic functions of filled pauses and
other pausing phenomena. Filled pauses (FPs) serve several pragmatic functions in speech, mainly planning but also turn-holding
and emphasis, and their use is also highly determined by register and setting. This research explores the different pragmatic
functions of FPs by analyzing their distribution in two different communication settings (conversation vs presentation setting),
combining a quantitative and a qualitative methodology, following
Kosmala & Crible’s (2021) study on the same data. Particular
attention was paid to the co-occurring gestural activity of
uh/ums and gaze behavior. Analyses show that the
pragmatic functions of FPs are also embodied in kinetic activities which differ according to the setting: more pragmatic and
referential ones were found during FPs in conversation than in the presentation setting, as well as more eye-contact, which
reflects their potential communicative role during interactional sequences.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Filled pauses, disfluency, and multimodality
- 3.Theoretical background and research questions
- 4.Data and methodology
- 4.1Corpus under study
- 4.2Methods
- 5.Quantitative results
- 5.1Overview of the data
- 5.2Gesture and gaze behavior during filled pauses: Differences between the two settings
- 6.Qualitative analyses
- 6.1Filled pauses as planners: Evidence from the two settings
- 6.2Filled pauses as time-buying strategies: Attending to other relevant activities in multimodal talk
- 6.3Filled pauses as intersubjective markers used for turn-taking
- 7.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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