Abstract
Although disfluent speech is pervasive in spoken conversation, disfluencies have received little attention within formal theories of grammar. The majority of work on disfluent language has come from psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension and from structural approaches designed to improve performance in speech applications. In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of this phenomenon in the scope of formal grammar, and present a detailed formal account which: (a) unifies disfluencies (self-repair) with Clarification Requests, without conflating them, (b) offers a precise explication of the roles of all key components of a disfluency, including editing phrases and filled pauses, and (c) accounts for the possibility of self addressed questions in a disfluency. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.9 BibTeX info
Highlights
Disfluencies are pervasive in spoken conversation, they have typically been viewed by theoretical linguists as the “untouchables” of language — elements not fit to populate the grammatical domain
Arnold, Kam & Tanenhaus 2007 showed that during reference resolution what we call forward looking disfluencies allow listeners to infer that the speaker is having difficulty with lexical retrieval, which in a reference identification task leads listeners to look at those objects that are more difficult to name, a finding that has been replicated in a corpus study on more naturalistic dialogues reported in Schlangen, Baumann & Atterer 2009. (Interestingly, as Arnold, Kam & Tanenhaus 2007 report, the effect of the disfluencies to make reference to difficult-to-describe objects more likely goes away if listeners are told their partners suffer from aphasia and have problems finding words.)
This rule, which is equivalent to Parameter Identification (36) — apart from underspecifying the turn holder — allows us to analyse the alteration of a backward looking disfluencies (BLDs) as providing an answer to an issue that has been accommodated as maximal in QUD (MaxQUD) and whose fec corresponds to the reparandum of the disfluency
Summary
Disfluencies are pervasive in spoken conversation, they have typically been viewed by theoretical linguists as the “untouchables” of language — elements not fit to populate the grammatical domain. Error-repairs repair material that is deemed erroneous by the speaker These types of disfluencies can be, with a nod to the named distinction in the DAMSL annotation scheme Core & Allen 1997, labelled backward looking disfluencies, as here the moment of interruption is followed by an alteration that refers back to an already uttered reparandum. We can distinguish from these types those disfluencies where the moment of interruption is followed not by an alteration, but just by a completion of the utterance which is delayed by a filled or unfilled pause (hesitation) or a repetition of a previously uttered part of the utterance (repetitions) We will call this kind of disfluency forward looking; the following gives some examples of such disfluencies. From Switchboard Corpus (file sw2028): {C So, } it’s been inordinately warm, {F uh, } here, [ for, + {F uh, } for ] this time of year
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