Would a formulaic sequence be considered formulaic if native speakers place pauses in

[Whimsie]

Would a formulaic sequence be considered formulaic if native speakers place pauses in it?

Dear all,
If formulaic language is believed to holistically stored in and retrieved from memory, then it would be reproduced as a coherent unit, within which pauses would not appear. However, take 'i think' for example, i did find versions like 'I, I, think' and 'i...think' in the data I collected for my MA dissertation, a possible explanation was that the storage of formulaic language on the part of nonnative speakers of English seems different from that on natives. Recently I noticed that a native actually spoke 'I er think' and, in the movie I watched nights ago someone said 'i ... em think', I know they pause in this way partly because they want to achieve a certain rhetoric effect, but the question is, would a formulaic sequence be considered formulaic if native speakers also place pauses in it? since one of the defining features of formulaic language is phonological coherence, by which it means pauses should not occur within it.

Best
Whimsie

 

[Haiyang Ai]

回复: Would a formulaic sequence be considered formulaic if native speakers place pause

This is an interesting observation. As you said, the pause in native speakers discourse
might suggest some pragmatic meaning, rather than deficiency in fluency. But how
frequent will these pauses be? And how one could go about examining this, I mean,
it's not easy to elicit this kind of data, right?

 

[动态语法]

回复: Would a formulaic sequence be considered formulaic if native speakers place pause

As Haiyang said, this is a great question. My thoughts:

1) Pause itself can vary greatly in speech and can be used for many different purposes. There is a huge literature in psycholinguistics on this. This means that we cannot take any correspondence between the presence of a pause (or lack thereof) and formulacity for granted.

2) There are natural speech corpora available for analysis. If you are interested in English, there are obviously the London-Lund corpus, the Santa Barbara corpus, and many others that can be used for this.

 

[Whimsie]

回复: Would a formulaic sequence be considered formulaic if native speakers place pause

Thank you both for the replies.
The reason why I asked this question was that in some literature I read the absence of pauses was one of the criteria used to define formulaic language.
As there are a number of possibe reasons why pauses occur half way through we producing formulas, seems we should be cautious about using them as a sign for coherence in speech production.

Thanks for recommening those corpora, I have collected part of the data for my PhD thesis and I may compare what I ve got with BASE or MICASE.