Functions of Pauses and Hesitations in Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again

Abstract

All normal human beings have the ability to pass across different messages in different contexts without necessarily making use of the oral form of language. These other ways of passing across messages and meanings without using the oral form include gestures, facial expressions, vocalisers, interjections as well as pauses and hesitations which are the subjects of this study. The data for the study are extracted from Ola Rotimi’s play entitled Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again using insight from the concept of context for its analysis. The play is selected for the research because it contains several instances of the use of pauses and hesitations which are capable of yielding novel functions of the two phenomena. The novel functions of pauses and hesitations discovered in the data are: pauses and hesitations perform the function of emphasis when they occur together; hesitation is used to indicate that the current speaker is emotionally unstable; hesitation and pauses are used to demonstrate strategic competence during interactions; in addition, the two phenomena when deployed effectively in the appropriate context may indicate fear of the person that one is interacting with; lastly, hesitations can be used to pass across certain feelings that may be appropriately interpreted in context.