Hesitative markers <i>eto</i> and <i>eto samoe</i>: structural and temporal aspects

Abstract

The article discusses the structural and temporal aspects of the hesitative pragmatic markers eto ( ‘whatsit' ) and eto samoe ( ‘whatchamacallit' ). Pragmatic markers, filling in hesitation pauses in speech, fulfill a hesitative function in spontaneous spoken discourse and include a wide range of structurally different units: eto ( ‘whatsit' ), eto samoe ( ‘whatchamacallit' ), kak ego/eyo/ikh ( ‘whatshisname, whatshername, whatretheirnames' ), chto eshcho ( ‘what else' ), etc. As can be seen, by structure, hesitative markers are divided into words, word-combinations, and sentences; however, the sound duration of such markers remains uninvestigated. Considering the characteristics of speech rate in the hesitative markers with various structure - eto ( ‘whatsit' ) and eto samoe ( ‘whatchamacallit' ), - it is possible to test the hypothesis of the tendency to isochronism of speech units and to reveal the mean duration of the hesitative markers. The material for the analysis was approximately 100 contexts of use of the markers eto and eto samoe from the corpus of everyday Russian speech “One Day of Speech”. As a result of analyzing these markers, the mean sound duration of both markers themselves and one syllable in them was obtained. At the syllabic level, the tendency to isochronism was confirmed: one syllable in longer markers forms is pronounced slightly faster than in shorter forms - on average, 25 ms faster, and their structure turned out to be inversely proportional to their sound duration. The perspective of the study is to compare the sound duration of other hesitative markers, as well as to study the speech rate in pragmatic markers and content words, which, due to the hesitative function of markers, may differ from the rate in content units homophonic to markers.