The Syntactic Location of Hesitation Pauses | Zendy

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The Syntactic Location of Hesitation Pauses

Author(s) -

Peter Hawkins

Publication year - 1971

Publication title -

language and speech

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.713

H-Index - 52

eISSN - 1756-6053

pISSN - 0023-8309

DOI - 10.1177/002383097101400308

Subject(s) - linguistics , psychology , narrative , function (biology) , boundary (topology) , mathematics , philosophy , mathematical analysis , evolutionary biology , biology

Spontaneous narrative speech was obtained from 48 children by asking them to make up a story. A grammatical analysis of the hesitation pauses was carried out. Two-thirds of all the pauses, and three-quarters of the pause-time, was found to occur at boundaries between clauses. Pauses occasioned by lexical items occurred more frequently at a group boundary than within the group. It is suggested that the high frequency of clause-boundary pausing is a function of (a) the speech situation and (b) the range of options confronting the speaker at the beginning of a clause.

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