functions of er/erm etc

P

Pennylin

It is generally agreed that they function as pause fillers, yet do they function as hedges as well, as in the following examples?
[FONT=宋体]er I don't know[/FONT][FONT=宋体]er I think I'm[/FONT][FONT=宋体]er I think so[/FONT][FONT=宋体]erm I don't know[/FONT][FONT=宋体]erm I think I[/FONT][FONT=宋体]erm I think it[/FONT][FONT=宋体]erm I think it's[/FONT][FONT=宋体]erm I think the[/FONT]
[FONT=宋体][/FONT]
[FONT=宋体]In the above examples, er/erm are followed by epistemic expressions conveying the speaker's opinion. Can we say that er/erm soften the speaker's authoritativeness?[/FONT]
 
回复: functions of er/erm etc

Apart from hesitation marking or time buyer, filled pauses serve a wide range of different linguistic functions. There are a whole body of literature, psycholinguistic in particular, on the functions on filled pauses.
 
回复: functions of er/erm etc

Thank you, Dr Xu, for being so helpful and patient all the time.
Right, I'm gonna look for some references. Yet, could you offer any, if they are already available to you?:p
Again many thanks.
 
回复: functions of er/erm etc

Clark, Herbert and Jean Fox Tree. 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84: 73-111.

Fox Tree, Jean. 2001. Listeners’ uses of um and uh in speech comprehension. Memory and Cognition 29: 320–326.

Fox Tree, Jean. 2002. Interpreting pauses and ums at turn exchanges. Discourse Processes 34: 37–55.

Ward, Nigel. 2004. Pragmatic functions of prosodic features in non-lexical utterances. Speech Prosody 325-328.

Swerts, Marc. 1998. Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 485-496.

Shriberg, Elizabeth. 2001. To ‘errrr’ is human: Ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31: 153-169.

Find more in their References section.
 
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