An implicature for um: signaling relative expertise

Abstract

Many scholars characterize um as an involuntary emission that is devoid of meaning. Other scholars classify um as a non-linguistic signal that conveys certain messages or resolves a conversational problem, such as determining next speaker. Um is often assumed to signal `powerless language' because it displays speaker uncertainty. Yet an examination of real-time, written conversation in two online communities shows that participants sometimes use an um to mark an obvious flaw in prior talk. In the examples below, um may be used to mark talk as flawed on the basis of information that is available (although not necessarily known) to both parties. When um becomes associated with marking obvious flaws in prior talk, interlocutors may trade on this meaning and deploy an um to display for themselves a higher position of relative expertise, vis-à-vis their interlocutors, within local micro-social hierarchies of knowledge.