Hesitation. In Defence of ER and ERM

HESITATION. IN DEFENCE OF ER AND ERM

I. IntroductionSpeech differs in a number of ways from writing. How great the differences arehas only been fully realised when detailed comparisons were made possible bythe publication of large corpora that were partly or wholly based on the spokenlanguage. While the two media, speech and writing, necessarily have large sec-tions in common, it is true to say that they often use widely differing means ofconveying information. The means that are specific to speech were long eitherneglected or ignored by researchers, so that the description of individual lan-guages was formerly based mainly on their written manifestations.

One characteristic of speech is its frequent indication of hesitation or uncer-tainty. The means by which it is expressed range from nonlinguistic, such asgestures, facial expressions and bodily movements to linguistic, such as repeti-tions.1 Another linguistic hesitation marker is the pause, whether silent orfilled.2 This feature can now be studied by means of modern corpora.

II. Nature of problemHesitation markers are often not admitted within the bounds of lexis or gram-mar – in authoritative reference works they can be summarily dismissed or allbut ignored.3 They are often regarded as a nuisance, as a kind of debris lying inthe way of an ordered exposition. This attitude is certainly understandable inview of instances like the following:

ukspok00839 The er the <ZF0> the train er erm er it’s er altered now but thereukspok00452 Tansley was a chap who er erm er I suppose really Tansley was moreukspok00342 how long it takes <ZGY> them <ZG0> er er er er er <ZF1> and <ZF0> and ukspok00393 ways in which we say erm particularly things like tell and command erm <ZF1>

we er we<ZF0> we have er er er this seems to be a f <ZGY> it’sukspok00452 What about <ZG0> Ford? <M02> Er Ford yes er er er er yes he I erm er I knew

him at Oxford. Yes Ford had a very broad view.4

English Studies, 2003, 2, pp. 170-0013-838X/03/02-170/$16.00© 2003, Swets & Zeitlinger

1 See Albépart-Ottesen (2000).2 Cf. Poyatos (1993: 136): ‘In other words, there are no pauses that can be truly called unfilled;

or put differently, a truly “unfilled” space would not be a “pause”, for a pause is, by defini-tion, an interactive segment with a very specific structure determined by the cooccurrent be-haviors and the varying intensity of those behaviors, and by its duration, affecting in turn thepreceding (in its decoding) and succeeding (both in encoding and decoding) behaviors’. Sten-ström (1990) also operates with a pause type called ‘verbal fillers’, such as well.

3 NODE: ‘er exclamation expressing hesitation’. The only mention it receives in Quirk et al is‘A voiced hesitation (“er”) frequently follows such a use of but’. (1985: 19.59N)

4 <ZG1>, <ZG0> and <ZGY> mark transcribers’ guesses, <ZF1> … <ZF0> indicate repeti-tion and <M01> = male speaker 1, <M02> = male speaker 2, etc.

(The examples come from the Cobuild Corpus, see below.) But this trait is aprominent feature of ordinary speech, and it would therefore be surprising if itdid not fill some kind of communicative function over and above that of indi-cating hesitation. In this corpus-based paper I will look into its various uses andtry to present an overview.

III. Previous researchHesitation phenomena were earlier regarded as extralinguistic, as Quinting(1971: 12-14) shows. Nevertheless, ‘we have to conceive of hesitation pauses asa very basic feature in linguistic performance’ (ib.). The publication of the Lon-don-Lund Corpus of Spoken English made available material that was highlyrelevant to the investigation of such phenomena and which gave rise to im-portant studies in the field. The phenomenon has attracted the attention of psy-cholinguists, not least of those with an interest in aphasia, and it has come tobe seen as an important element of the spoken language.5 There is now a richliterature on the subject; the works of Quinting (1971), Ford (1978, 1993),Levelt (1989) and Stenström (1990) survey the research in the field. It has be-come evident that the sometimes irritating and seemingly random sprinkling ofer(m)s over conversations is rather less than random. In what follows I hope toshow that what are often regarded as hesitation phenomena are not only capa-ble of shedding some light on the way we manage our conversations but also in-strumental in furthering smooth and effortless communication. Hesitation maynot always be involved in the use of er(m), and instead of ‘hesitation marker’the term to be used in this study, as in several others, is ‘filled pause’, abbrevi-ated as FP.

IV. Proposed method of inquiryThe following study is based on material from the corpus known as Cobuild-Direct, a 57.4-million word corpus that is part of the much larger Bank of Eng-lish. Silent pauses are not recorded in the two big corpora of modern English,the BNC and the Bank of English, nor are facial expressions, gestures and bod-ily movements.6 Filled pauses, on the other hand, are variously represented inthe literature by ah, er, erm, mm, uh, um (also referred to as [ε, æ, r., ə, m. ]7). Byfar the most frequent of those in the Cobuild Corpus, and the only ones thatare primarily used as FPs, are er and erm. Since the transcripts indicate neithertheir prosody and relative length, nor the silent pauses, it is evident that onlypart of the hesitation phenomenon can be addressed here. This study, then, willbe based on the occurrence of the filled pauses er and erm in the Cobuild Cor-

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5 Cf. Poyatos (1993: 136):As for the inaccuracy (especially from a semiotic or communicative point of view) of thepoorly studied dichotomy filled pause (e.g., ‘Er –’) and unfilled pause, it simply leads manyinto disregarding the communicative values of nonverbal paralinguistic and kinesic message,for ‘Er –’ is, in the first place, a very lexical paralinguistic alternant …

6 Cf. Christenfeld et al. (1991) on the relationship of filled pauses and gestures, and Poyatos(1993, Ch. 3) on kinesics.

7 Quinting (1971: 17). In the London-Lund Corpus they are rendered as [ə(m)] or [ə:(m)].

pus. A discussion of their frequency in the spoken language (V a) will be fol-lowed by an investigation of their localisation in the utterance (V b), their func-tions (V c), where pure hesitation, signposting of speaker turns,attention-catching, highlighting and correction will be addressed in turn. Thepaper will end with comments on the overlap and structuring effects of theirfunctions (VI) and a conclusion (VII).

V. Results(a) Frequency and comparison of er and ermFPs are quite frequent. Ford (1993: 46f) estimates that

it would be quite normal, for example, to find that in spontaneous speech a speaker produced asilent pause before 65% of the sentences uttered and a filled pause before 25%. Further, it wouldbe quite normal for over 20% of clauses within the sentences to be preceded by a silent pauseand for over 4% to be preceded by a filled pause. Pausing before words within clauses is less fre-quent, but is still perhaps more frequent than we realize – about 10% of words within clausesmay be preceded by a silent pause and about 2% may be preceded by a filled pause.

Stenström (1990: 223) found in her 10 texts from the London-Lund Corpus thatfilled pauses (including glottal filled pauses) ranged from 23% to 1% per text. Inthe BNC there are 87,099 cases of er and 59,820 cases of erm; the great major-ity of them occur in the 10-million-word spoken component, 85,563 cases of erand 59,192 cases of erm, altogether 1.5% of its word-mass.

In Cobuild there are 98,315 cases of er.8 This figure should be taken with apinch of salt, containing as it does many cases of truncated forms (numb er, roller, o’er, ne’er, e’er …), names (We Er Kaixi, Mohammed Er-Raisuli), abbrevia-tions (ER) and unconventional forms (’er for her, Eng-er-land). There are 84,154 cases of erm in the corpus. This category also contains some irrelevantforms, particularly ERM (the European Exchange Rate Mechanism).

In Cobuild er and erm thus account for (98,315 + 84,154=) 182,469 occur-rences. They are among the most frequent ‘words’ in the language, representingthree ‘words’ in every 1000. In Cobuild they would come as number 31 in aranking list if counted together, just below not and just above or. On the otherhand, in the subcorpus with the spoken British material, where they are themost frequent, er(m) together represent (97,580 + 83,918 =) 181,498 out of 9 272,579, i.e. 2%, or twenty ‘words’ in every 1000.

If the FPs are thus chiefly to be found in spoken English, it could be addedthat they do exist in other text categories as well, as appears from Table 1, seeAppendix. The occurrences in non-spoken texts are chiefly (but not exclusively)such as render spoken conversation. It could be noted that the feature is prac-tically non-existent in the American spoken source National Public Radio (npr),cf. its British equivalent (bbc). The comment by Gove (1971) is relevant:

er the ‘ër, usu. prolonged, used by many R speakers when they encounter ‘er’ as they read aloudis not an accurate reproduction of the sound that the spelling, introduced by -R speakers, is in-tended to convey\ interj – used to express hesitation <said shyly ‘I – ~ – don’t know’>

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8 Compare the figures for um: 265, uh: 1944 (mostly as uh-huh), ugh: 175 (not hesitation).

As we shall see later (see V c 1, 2), there are some differences in the use of erand erm, but it does not seem to be the case, as might have been suspected, thater is used before words beginning in consonants and erm before words begin-ning in vowels (to avoid hiatus). A sample consisting of two random sets, oneof 100 instances of er and one of 100 instances of erm gave the following result:

+ vowel + consonant Totaler 23 77 100erm 25 75 100

(b) Localisation. A facility provided by Cobuild for any desired word in the Corpus is that of a‘picture by frequency’, i.e. a presentation of the most frequent collocates of theword. The ‘picture by frequency’ for er (where NODE = er) is this:

the the and NODE i i heer i er NODE er the iand er the NODE the you era it but NODE you s sof and that NODE and er ofi of s NODE a and ayou yeah of NODE it it youto you erm NODE we a andthat to to NODE in of oyeah that was NODE that know that

It shows that the word most frequently occurring immediately before er is and,and the word most frequently following it is I (given as ‘i’). The second mostfrequently occurring word immediately before, and also immediately after it, iser. In other words, er er is a very frequent combination. The same operationgives this ‘picture by frequency’ for erm (where NODE, consequently, = erm):

the mm and NODE i i iof yeah that NODE and the theto the but NODE the you youa of the NODE but s sand right of NODE you and ayou you to NODE er it ofyeah to s NODE it er thatthat it so NODE so that iti yes er NODE we know tmm and it NODE a we to

The picture is very similar. Again the word most frequently occurring immedi-ately before the node is and, and the word most frequently following it is I. Thesecond most frequently occurring word immediately before it is that, and thesecond most frequent word following it is and. All this would seem to suggestthat the FP is used to provide thinking time for figuring out what to say nextand how to say it:

ukspok0044 well time is drawing on and er I don’t want to go on too long

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One main function of er(m) thus seems to be to introduce what I will looselycall a new ‘thought unit’, a word, a phrase and sometimes a whole clause. Thethought unit can then be a unit at word, phrase as well as clause level, but it ismostly smaller than the ‘idea units’ proposed by a number of researchers9 as theelements of cycles of cognitive rhythm. It often coincides with what Ford (1993:48)10 and others11 term a ‘basic clause’ or ‘deep clause’, i.e. a verbal unit con-sisting of a verb, finite or nonfinite, with its dependent elements (essentially averb phrase), but it can thus also be a smaller element, a lexical word. Contentdecisions require some effort and thus some pausing.12 The term ‘thought unit’has been chosen so as to reflect the nature of elements that the speaker con-stantly finds himself in front of, elements that require some deliberation, someplanning, which may range from very simple, such as finding an appropriateword,13 to quite complicated, such as deciding on which out of a great numberof facts to communicate, and in what order.14 The manifestations of thoughtunits, as conceived here, are naturally divided into words, phrases and clauses.

1. Introducing thought units at word level.As will be shown below, phrases of different kinds are frequently introduced byFPs. If the idea of thought units is accepted, this is a natural consequence;phrases constitute not only syntactic but also semantic units. Nevertheless, FPsdo occur, although far less often, in front of single words inside phrases, typi-cally before semantically ‘heavy’ words.15 (See further below, V c 4.) Some ex-amples are:

ukmags00818 Ladies and gentlemen, we give you FM Cornog, champion of the lonely and friendof the, er, underdog.

ukspok00733 which is also shown to the jury so they get two er cracks at looking at it.ukspok00827 But I always took a very er great interest in it.ukspok00051 a year which struck me as being rather er funny

The fact that the Cobuild Corpus is tagged will make it possible to give an in-dication to what extent FPs occur inside certain phrases.16 If we study the oc-currence of FPs with noun phrases and start with a simple determiner plus noun(DET+NN) such as the garden, the distribution is the following:

er ermer(m)+DET+NN 3741 2497DET+er(m)+NN 1056 619

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9 Ford (1993: 50).10 ‘[I]t is the basic clause that is primary’. (p. 48)11 See Levelt (1989 : 256f.).12 Goldman-Eisler, Skarbek & Henderson (1965), quoted by Ford (1993: 49).13 Levelt (1989: 201f.).14 Cf. Levelt’s ‘microplanning’ and ‘macroplanning’ (1989: 5).15 Stenström (1990: 243) found that 1% of all filled pauses separated words in phrases in her

material.16 It should be kept in mind that a position before a given type of word is also a position after

another type of word, and that it is not always obvious which neighbour is the more influ-ential one.

and if we add an adjective (DET+JJ+NN), as in a fine garden, we get the fol-lowing distribution:

er ermer(m)+DET+JJ+NN 1040 584DET+er(m)+JJ+NN 221 122DET+JJ+er(m)+NN 327 221

We can conclude that although the noun phrase as such is very often precededby FPs, the individual words that make it up can also be so preceded, if onlyless often. A similar conclusion can be drawn with regard to adjective phrases.With combinations of adverbs and adjectives like very nice, i.e. RB+JJ, the dis-tribution is this:

er ermer(m)+RB+JJ 483 246RB+er(m)+JJ 144 88

Again the FPs can insert themselves in the phrase, as for instance in very, er,nice.

2. Introducing thought units at phrase level.Noun and adjective phrases. We just saw that phrases are frequently precededby FPs. In Stenström’s (1990: 243) material, 2% of all filled pauses separatedphrases (but when all the pauses, silent and filled, were counted, ‘the majorityof the pauses occurred between clause elements [phrases] and not between claus-es’, 234). We also saw that FPs occur more often before the entire noun phrasethan before part of it. In the same way FPs are more frequent before an entireadjective phrase than before part of it. Here are some examples of phrase-in-troductory FPs:

ukmags00351 the aforementioned Trespass where he plays er, a gangster.ukspok00835 Well I that’s er my only experience so <ZF1> I <ZF0> I can’t talk about any partsukspok01328 tell me something now about er your first job. Where you started <ZF1> andukspok01534 and it may well be er a rather lovely thing that I’m picking up onukspok00001 I teach er a six year old the violin which is quite interesting.ukspok01664 there are various different cults … that follow different deities so it is er entirely

different.ukspok00053 trying to actually fake them and they looked er startlingly realistic

If we consider only the articles, we shall find, as expected, that FPs occur moreoften before than after them:

% pre-articlea er 537 er a 2054 79.3a erm 283 erm a 1275 81.8

the er 3057 er the 3559 53.8the erm 2110 erm the 2392 53.1

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but, also, that FPs are, relatively speaking, more frequent before the indefinite(79.3%, 81.8%) than before the definite article (53.8%, 53.1%). The reasonwould seem to be that a noun phrase introduced by the indefinite article most-ly introduces new information, which can be assumed to require more mentaleffort to process than the given information conveyed by a noun phrase intro-duced by the definite article.

Verb phrases. Have/has/had in perfect-tense and pluperfect constructions arenaturally seen as part of the VP; as expected, er(m) occurs before them ratherthan before the main verb. Consider first phrases like had tried:17

er ermer(m)+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN 56 38HV|HVZ|HVD+er(m)+VBN 24 21

had tried it:er(m)+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN+PPO 8 5HV|HVZ|HVD+er(m)+VBN+PPO 1 1HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN+er(m)+PPO 1 0

I had tried it:er(m)+PPS+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN+PPO 28 16PPS+er(m)+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN+PPO 2 0PPS+HV|HVZ|HVD+er(m)+VBN+PPO 0 0PPS+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN+er(m)+PPO 1 0

and, finally, My dad had tried:er(m)+DET+NN|NNS+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN 28 28DET+er(m)+NN|NNS+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN 4 3DET+NN|NNS+er(m)+HV|HVZ|HVD+VBN 4 2DET+NN|NNS+HV|HVZ|HVD+er(m)+VBN 1 1

A few examples are:

ukspok00492 one of them this Australian woman er has been working for ages at the ermukspok00220 people working on the B B C Dictionary erm have started using that. ukspok00826 another thing about Shrewsbury which erm has impressed me since was that

In all cases, the FPs are more frequent before the auxiliary than before the mainverb. An interesting fact emerges when the same operation is applied to modalphrases:

must try:er(m)+MD+VB 75 43MD+er(m)+VB 222 86

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17 HV|HVZ|HVD = have/has/had; VBN = verb, past participle; PPO = personal pronoun objectcase; PPS = personal pronoun subject case.

must try it:er(m)+MD+VB+PPO 7 4MD+er(m)+VB+PPO 31 14MD+VB+er(m)+PPO 1 1

I must try it:er(m)+PPS+MD+VB+PPO 108 90PPS+er(m)+MD+VB+PPO 0 0PPS+MD+er(m)+VB+PPO 22 10PPS+MD+VB+er(m)+PPO 1 0

My dad must try:er(m)+DET+NN|NNS+MD+VB 23 19DET+er(m)+NN|NNS+MD+VB 6 3DET+NN|NNS+er(m)+MD+VB 4 3DET+NN|NNS+MD+er(m)+VB 9 1

A few examples:

ukspok00073 players of your own team getting into a position where they could er score a goal.ukspok00108 you don’t think that the school should er learn people to read and writeukspok00100 We must er tell Mr John Delleck

Here the situation is clearly different. The favoured place of FPs is no longerbefore the verb phrase (MD+VB) but between the modal and the main verb.Why is this? One suggestion could be that have/has/had are felt as having littlesemantic content and do not contribute much to the meaning of the phrase, justlike a determiner, which is also semantically lightweight. The thought unit thusconsists of the entire verb phrase. Modals, on the other hand, have a more dis-tinctive meaning of their own and represent a step in the semantic progression,as it were. Having dealt with the modal, the speaker finds himself in front ofanother thought unit, the main verb, which then is more likely than the partici-ple in the first construction to elicit an er(m). Whether this explanation is ade-quate is not easy to say; passive verb forms find themselves between theprevious two categories.18

is tried: er ermer(m)+BE|BEM|BER|BED|BEZ|BEDZ|BEG+VBN 91 54BE|BEM|BER|BEZ|BEDZ|BED|BEG+er(m)+VBN 132 52

Preposition phrases. If it is the case, as it seems to be, that hesitation in the formof er(m) is more frequent before a phrase than inside it, the situation with re-gard to preposition phrases appears somewhat problematic.

The position of both er and erm after a preposition (IN) is more frequentthan a position before it:

er+IN 4892 erm+IN 2940IN+er 8206 IN+erm 6428

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18 BE|BEM|BER|BEZ|BEDZ|BED|BEG=be, am, are, is, was, were, being.

This is also true when short preposition phrases, like by implication, for assess-ment, are concerned:

er+IN+NN 510 erm+IN+NN 316IN+er+NN 611 IN+erm+NN 451

Prepositions, stranded prepositions apart, normally introduce a prepositionphrase, and FPs normally occur more often before phrases than inside them,but with preposition phrases FPs favour the position after the preposition. Howcan one then understand this deviant behaviour of FPs in connexion withprepositions? One explanation could be that, generally speaking, er(m) occursmainly after such prepositions that are part of a noun, verb or adjective com-plement (‘interested in, er, books’, cf. ?‘interested, er, in books’) but mainly be-fore such prepositions that introduce an adjunct (‘interested, er, in the morningbut not, er, in the evening’, cf. ?‘interested in, er, the morning but not in, er, theevening’).19 If that is so, it would be an indication that there is a fundamentaldifference between ‘complement PPs’ and ‘adjunct PPs’, so that the former arenot really complete preposition phrases; the analysis of in books in the above ex-ample as a preposition phrase would then be doubtful, and the traditional ana-lysis of books as a prepositional object governed by interested in would bepreferable. In fact, if two samples of er before or after preposition are com-pared, one of er + preposition, and one of preposition + er, the above hypo-thesis receives a good deal of support. In Table 2 (see the Appendix) there aretwo samples from the Cobuild Corpus, one of the first 50 lines in the Corpus ofinstances of er + preposition, and one of the first 50 lines of preposition + er.Some irrelevant lines have been deleted from the lists: repeated lines, abbrevia-tions, ‘er for her, and truncated forms (writ er, Er skine). Even a quick glanceat the lists will show that List (a) is dominated by er + prepositional adverbialadjuncts, while in List (b) er is predominantly preceded by a preposition that ispart of a verbal or adjectival complement. The tendencies are illustrated by lineslike the following:

ukspok0019 twenty five years ago I started my career looking at er the flow of funds er in Turkeyukspok00838 I hear too much about er the divisions er within the students between those who ukspok00363 I’m also looking at er er FIP Theatres erm er in terms of <ZF1> the <ZF0> the

use we make of information

where in the same line there is a FP after a complement preposition and beforean adjunct preposition.

In the (b) list, a frequent preposition is of, which is characteristically part ofa complement but which rarely introduces an adjunct. For this reason the rela-tion between er(m)+ of and of + er(m) is of interest. The first combination oc-curs 513 times and the second nearly seven times as often, 3530 times in thecorpus. The most frequent combinations are these:

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19 This particular opposition is well illustrated by the Cobuild Corpus: there are 16 (+14) casesof ‘interested in er(m) …’ and just 1 (+0) of ‘interested er(m) in …’.

VERB+er+of 20 VERB+erm+of 5VERB+of+er 127 VERB+of+erm 98

NN+er+of 81 NN+erm+of 39NN+of+er 1262 NN+of+erm 969

JJ+er+of 12 JJ+erm+o 3JJ+of+er 47 JJ+of+erm 29

This would support the traditional assumption that complement prepositionsare notionally more closely linked to their preceding heads than to a followingnoun phrase.

Not phrases. It is interesting, and perhaps slightly puzzling to find that bother and erm are more frequent before not than after it, as the place before not ismost of the time taken by a finite verb well integrated with not.20

er not 320 not er 279erm not 203 not erm 160

One might not, indeed, have expected to find FPs in conjunction with not at all.In fact they are only rarely attached to not in relation to their other lexical part-ners.21 That there are relatively few of them after not may not therefore be sur-prising, but it is noteworthy that there are more of them before not. This couldmake one suspect that their function when positioned before not is to indicatea use of not that is distinct from its normal use. This is actually borne out byour material. Table 3 in the Appendix, a sample consisting of the first 50 linesfrom the concordance of er not compared with the first 50 lines from the con-cordance of not er, shows that the former, er not, is in the majority of cases usedto introduce an additional item of information, often a reservation, whereas thelatter, not er, is mostly better integrated with its surrounding language ele-ments.22 Here are two typical examples, one of the er not and one of the not ersituation:

ukspok00015 I will be presenting a whole range of music erm er not just the classical music ukspok00109 I mean I am not er er a learner as such I used to ride a bike years ago

It is significant that in the transcription of the sample er is spelled with a capi-tal E in more than a third of the er not instances (18 times), indicating a breakwith the foregoing, whereas the same spelling occurs only three times with noter. See Table 3 in Appendix.

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20 This is the case with 67 out of the 100 first examples of not in the Corpus.21 There are 205,357 cases of not in the Corpus, of which er(m) not and not er(m) answer for

962 = 0.5%. The corresponding percentages for e.g. er(m) am/am er(m), er(m) had/hader(m) and er(m) did/did er(m) are 1.7%, 1.1% and 1.9%, respectively.

22 But cf. footnote 16.

3. Introducing thought units at clause level.If we think of FPs as signalling something new, a new thought unit, it would benatural to expect to find them at the beginning of clauses. The corpus has manyexamples of the following type:

ukspok00100 Thank you bye bye. <M01> Bye bye. Er let’s say hello to Rita in Lichfieldukspok30915 What I will have to do is er because I close now is to refer to our underwriting

departmentukspok00032 it doesn’t matter because er when I am doing it I’m working on your stomach

nerve as wellukspok00373 no-one can understand er why in three years he’s managed to achieve what he’s

achieved.

To get an idea of their frequency, we could again make use of the tagging andlook at their co-occurrence with co-ordinating (CC) and subordinating (CS)conjunctions:

er + CC 4175 (ukspok: 4161) CC + er 12034 (ukspok: 12002)erm + CC 7194 (ukspok: 7176) CC + erm 7299 (ukspok: 7282)

er + CS 2389 (ukspok: 2379) CS + er 2935 (ukspok: 3925)erm + CS 2740 (ukspok: 2730) CS + erm 3410 (ukspok: 3409)

There are 324,724 CC and 222,242 CS in ukspok, the spoken UK module.Some interesting facts emerge from these figures:

•er is vastly more frequent after a co-ordinating conjunction (but er, and er)than before it, whereas erm is only marginally more frequent in postposition. •when FPs occur with subordinating conjunctions, they have a slight preferencefor postposition.•FPs (both er and erm) are notably less frequent before or after subordinatingconjunctions than they are before or after co-ordinating conjunctions.

There are thus many more FPs with co-ordinating (30,621/324,724 = 9.4%)than with subordinating (12,443/222,242= 5.6%) conjunctions. This supportsthe idea that FPs are used to signpost a new thought unit: subordinated claus-es are obviously more intimately integrated semantically with their matrixclause and therefore less often constitute a completely new and separatethought unit. That tendency is in line with the work of Ford (1978), who foundthat ‘all clause types had significant levels of pausing before and after the ini-tial word, but that the pausing was the most frequent towards the beginning ofco-ordinate clauses.’ It is obvious that the beginning of a new sentence or thebeginning of co-ordinate clauses normally coincides with the introduction of anew thought unit.

The fact that FPs tend to follow rather than precede conjunctions, especiallyco-ordinating conjunctions, is interesting, if only because Stenström (1990: 237-8) found that in her material all the pauses, silent and filled, occurred predom-inantly before the co-ordinating conjunction. (An explanation why FPs are sofrequent after conjunctions will be offered below, under ‘Turnholding’.) As andis the most frequent co-ordinating conjunction, it was investigated separately,with the following result:

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er and 2698 and er 8784erm and 4703 and erm 4845

So FPs occur more often after than before and (and er 76.5%, and erm 50.7%).Here are some typical cases:

ukmags00861 I can’t stop feeling down she coos on ‘Evangeline’. And, er, that’s it. ukspok00020 the same kind of output as a modern sector and er what we can show is that ukspok00035 they became like one of the biggest independent production companies of the time.

And er she became quite well-known

It goes without saying that and is also used to introduce co-ordinates belowclause-level, as in

ukspok00019 you get concessional loans from the International Development Agency and erForeign Aid and things like that

which means that the above figures cannot be taken to refer to clause-intro-duction exclusively. That er often occurs as a clause opener is also shown by itspreference for a position immediately after (paragraph break) rather thanbefore it.

er + 13 + er 30

Erm, on the other hand, seems to prefer a position at the end of a paragraph:

erm + 22 + erm 6

(The figures are small, because paragraph breaks are not used in the spokensubcorpora, the main habitat of FPs.)

(c) FunctionsThe approach adopted in this paper is that the FPs are not primarily used hap-hazardly, or automatically resulting from other communicative devices. It willbe suggested here that, like other speech components, they should be lookedupon in most cases as task-performing elements, employed to bring about cer-tain effects. They can be said to have certain functions. It may be objected thata function is a ‘mode of action by which it fulfils its purpose’,23 and since mostof the time FPs are unintentional, perhaps unconscious, the proposed effectcannot be the fulfilling of a purpose. However, FPs and intonation are alike inthat the speaker may well make use of them unconsciously in aiming for a cer-tain effect that s/he achieves without understanding how it was brought about.24

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23 COD.24 ‘Pauses and verbal fillers can be used unconsciously, as when they occur with breathing or as

hesitation signals. They can also be used consciously, for example as structural markers or asa means for the speaker to manipulate the listener and save face’. (Stenström 1990: 243)

In the following, some of the main functions for which FPs are used will be dis-cussed separately.

1. Hesitation properOur dictionaries tell us that FPs occur to indicate uncertainty or hesitation onthe part of the speaker. That this is often so becomes evident when we consid-er the company that they keep. Table 4 in the Appendix presents the elementsthat FPs significantly co-occur with. The elements are ordered according totheir t-score value. The second column gives the number of times the FP andthe collocate co-occur, and the third column gives the t-score, a statistical mea-sure which adjusts for overall frequency. ‘It measures the degree of confidencewe have that two words occur together more than they would do by chance.’(CobuildDirect, Instructions.) Several indications of hesitation appear from thistable, to which we shall have occasion to return later on. First, FPs tend tooccur next to each other: one of the top collocates of er is erm, and, corre-spondingly, one of the top collocates of erm is er.

ukspok00025 everybody knows that roads generate traffic er erm and displace traffic problems ukspok00026 and this could er erm have er positive or negative effects.ukspok00015 of an <ZF1> extraordinary erm er <ZF0> extraordinary exercise. ukspok00015 but it will be a vital new erm er facility for the city centre.

In addition, it could be noted that the chief collocate of er is er itself, that is,the sequence er er is significantly frequent:

ukspok00015 which is being organized by er er Junior Chamber West Midlandsukspok00016 <M0X> Have you been bitten er er at all? <M01> Yeah.

If we take repetition of er and erm to be a sign of hesitation, it seems that er ismore often used in this capacity than erm:

er er 3927erm erm 460

Further, they both co-occur significantly with ‘false starts’, repeated words(tagged <ZF1> … <ZF0> in the Corpus). Such repetitions indicate uncertain-ty and are in themselves hesitation markers, see Albépart-Ottesen (2000):

ukspok0003 It says on that tape doesn’t it erm <ZF1> Kevin <ZF0> Kevin isn’t armedukspok00044 otherwise the definition fits a ‘bench’ er <ZF1> equally <ZF0> equally well.

There are 4 528 such cases of er and 3 124 such cases of erm. On the other hand,such false starts are relatively seldom followed by er(m), 91 cases of er and 17of erm, probably because the false start has given the speaker time to organisethe rest of the sentence so that no further time for thinking is called for:

ukspok00015 s <ZF1> I don’t mean <ZF0> er I don’t mean to make that sound mischievousbut

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Table 4 shows that one of the most important collocates of both er and erm is<tc text=pause>. As Ford (1993: 49) points out, ‘it could be that speakers haveno views or knowledge about certain difficult topics and therefore pause25 be-cause they have nothing substantial to say’, or that they are at a loss to find theappropriate word:

ukspok0005. I mean she s oh er she says she’ll get a later train if you like. <tc text=pause> Erm<tc text=pause> I’m just trying to think.

ukspok00115 phones. And there was this er <tc text=pause> And we were told then

FPs also occur significantly next to uncertainties marked as guesses (<ZG1><ZG0>)26.

ukspok00728 MX called in and said there’s a lack of er <ZG1> scissom <ZG0> going on.ukspok00822 And erm a lot of people who went to erm er <ZG1> Lo <ZG0> well got scholar-

shipsukspok00831 and what was the other c er <ZG1> hater <ZG0> centre

All of these factors signal hesitation, which the top collocates of er and erm thussuggest is their chief use, and the only use that is recognised in most dictionar-ies. Cf. also the introductory examples on p 1.

This, however, is not the whole story. FPs have other functions, which alsoserve important purposes. We will next take a look at some of those.

2. Signposting speaker turnsi. Turntaking. As Stenström (1990: 227) points out, filled pauses (= our er(m)s) often serve asturn initiators. This is obvious in our material, where cases like the followingabound:

times60120 Charles, who is this Er, this is Diana and we’re in love,ukmags00343 Eventually the assistant cleared her throat Er, we don’t get much demand for

those any more around here she stutteredtoday20820 What have you got to say about all this, Andrew Er, me?’ began the Duke of

York. ‘Welltoday40311 may I ask how old you are, Paul Paul: Er, 12. times51104 Are you ready, Princess? Princess: Er, yah ukbooks00010 I’ll post the rest, Lovejoy. Buy an overcoat.’ Er, good idea.’ukspok01473<M01> Hello. Is er MX there please? <F01> Er who’s calling? <M01> It’s MX.ukspok00022 But they have the opportunity of saving money? <ZG0> <M01> Er. They have an opportunity of putting money in the bank.

Examples like the above might suggest that turntaking is normally an orderlyaffair where the participants in the conversation patiently await their turn to saytheir piece. This, however, is often not the case, as is shown by the following ex-amples, where interruptions and overlaps characterise the conversation.

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25 Note that a pause could be silent or filled. [GK]26 The guess is the transcriber’s, not the speaker’s!

ukspok00061 <M08> Because I’ve got a good I’ve had a lot of <M01> Er what you got a do<ZF1> so so <ZF0> son-in-law or daughter-in-law have you got?

ukspok00498 So I wonder whether there is an answer to when <ZF1> we <ZF0> we will move from one er stage <M01> Er er if we look at making big decisions I mean the decisions where somebody lived was nearly always taken in these communities by the woman.

ukspok00833 And mining t ceased the mining lecturers er found other posts elsewhere. <M01> Mm. <M02> Rather interesting where <M01> Er did it became the department of minerals engineering.

ukspok00839 you know he didn’t tell Bon he went and reported to this dreadful man MX<M01> <tc text=intake of breath> <M02> and erm it was <M01> Er the university secretary.<M02> Yes the university dictator.

Here the hesitation element is clearly relegated to a subsidiary position, if it ex-ists at all. The speaker who signals by means of er(m) that he wants to takeover the turn is mostly successful in doing so, but sometimes he fails, at leasttemporarily. In the following extracts speaker M01 is initially unsuccessful intrying to break in by means of er :

ukspok01640 In fact the Accademia Italiana the <ZGY> gave us <ZF1> the <ZF0> the accolade of the best restaurant <ZF1> in <ZF0> in England <M01> Er we are talk <M07> for authenticity <M01> We are talking here of the Neal Street Restaurant in London.

ukspok00826 <M02> whereas my teaching had to be very broad and the size of the classes went up from three to about seventy <M01> Good Lord. <M02> and so I had some difficulty in er <M01> Er yes you mean <M02> keeping ahead of them.

ukspok01010 <F02> It’s <M01> Er <F02> too much to ask now. <M01> but Yes but thanksvery much for telling me

In Table 4, er(m) shows a significant tendency to occur next to answer partic-les (yeah, yes, mm, right) and also next to a turn-beginning (<M01>, <F01>,etc.). As far as the latter was concerned, it was worth investigating whether‘next to a turn-beginning’ meant before or after it.

% post-tag<M01-10>+er 5834 er+<M01-10> 2350 71.3<F01-10>+er 3197 er+<F01-10> 1672 65.7

<M01-10>+erm 7045 erm+<M01-10> 2427 74.4<F01-10>+erm 7642 erm+<F01-10> 2126 78.2Total 23718 8575 73.4

It appears from these figures that FPs occur relatively often (23,718 x) at the be-ginning of a speech turn and relatively seldom (8,575 x) at the end of it. Everyseventh or eighth er(m) (182,469/23,718=7.7) is used to introduce a speech turn.It is evident that turn introduction is one of the chief uses of er(m). It is alsoof some interest to see that both men and women use erm more often than erto introduce a speech turn, that men use er much more often than women to in-troduce a speech turn, and that women use erm more often than men to do so. ii. TurnholdingAnother function evolving out of turntaking is that of turnholding. A speakerwho is at a loss for a word and falls silent for an instant runs the risk of being

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interrupted by his interlocutor(s) or of losing their interest.27 A pause filled wither(m) (as with other fillers like um or I mean) will indicate that the speaker ispreparing a new information unit, intends to go on speaking and is not willingto yield his turn. The turnholding function can therefore be seen as a variant ofthe turntaking one. As we saw above, there is a fair number of and er(m) casesin the material, a typical device to hold the floor, as in

ukspok00491 he’s just horrible he’s really horrible and erm <M01> Oh I’m so sorry FX. <F01>Yeah.

ukspok00047 <M02> Yeah. I mean he knew Bobby Charlton <000> and er <M01> Yeah that’snice. <M02> And of course he knows his brother Jack and …

The great number of FPs following conjunctions (V b iii) could be an indica-tion of the frequent occurrence of turnholding. Cenoz (2000: 54) argues againstthe idea that filled pauses can serve a floor-holding function, and thinks ‘thatthe fact that filled pauses are very common in lectures with no possibility of in-terruption seems to contradict this hypothesis’. This, however, is hardly a validobjection, as filled pauses have several other functions that are manifested inmost lectures. The following could be examples of their turnholding function:

ukspok01385 <M01> … There was nothing to do with Pakistani culture or Pakistani er mixtures<F01> Mm <M01> er or er any of the er Pakistani societies.

ukspok00075 What would you prefer to do? Would you prefer to spend your money <tc text=pause> erm in a country where you spend a hundred pounds and you get <M35> Out-put <M01> er output of twenty pounds a year or would you spend your money where

ukspok00836 <M01> <ZF1> T <ZF0> tell me a little bit about MX then. You were saying he’s <M02> The <M01> er good to work with.

ukspok000820 I came to nearly all the university open days and asked er questions and got toknow extra people there er er and er I took some interest in the departmental activities.

ukspok001664. It does take a bit of time to get to know the Mexicans erm er and I suppose inthat sense they’re sort of like the British of Latin America

There is clearly a hesitation element here, the speaker trying to think what tosay next without having to yield his turn.

iii. TurnyieldingParadoxically, it is often difficult to distinguish in writing the function of turn-holding from that of turnyielding, particularly when we have no information onthe relevant prosodic elements. Both can occur at the end of propositions, butwhile turnholding indicates that the speaker wishes to continue, turnyieldingrather suggests the opposite. The use of FPs in turnyielding occurs in situationswhere the hesitation element is very prominent, and where Ford’s reference tospeakers who ‘have nothing substantial to say’ (1993: 49) is apposite. Here it isclear that intonation patterns play an important role. One can almost hear thevoice of the speaker trailing off at the end, hoping to be relieved. I have inter-preted the ers in the following sentences as turnyielding FPs:

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27 Stenström (1990: 248), Albépart-Ottesen (2000).

ukspok00061 Hello Lesley? <F01> Hello John. <M01> What shall we talk about? <F01> Well I wanted to talk about the hostages. Er <M01> Oh yes. Yes. In the ones in Leb in the Lebanon? <F01> Yeah.

ukspok00062 <M02> At least I’m not in Birmingham I’m staying in Lichfield but my pupils are.<M01> Yes. <M02> So er we are visiting er <M01> You’re over on a trip are you? <M02>Yes we’re on a trip.

ukspok00065 I can’t see wh you know erm <tc text=pause> I don’t know I mean er er <M01>MX you’re very eloquent. Can we thank you for coming on. <M04> Thank you very much.

iv. Co-occurrenceThe three types, turntaking, turnholding and turnyielding, naturally often co-occur. The following seem to be examples of unsuccessful turnholding followedby turntaking:

ukspok00095 <M07> They still have their Dukes and Marquesses and Counts and all sorts butnone of these er titled people are entitled to sit anywhere. <M01> Mm. <M07> They er.<M01> Er what are [sic] the difference between the House of Deputies and the Senate?

ukspok00812 I don’t know how I got on to this. Right. Well that’s erm <M01> Er now all this experience must have been leading up to a terrific erm

Here is an example of multiple turnyielding and turntaking:

(1) <M01> S you were w you were erm drafted into er what fire-watching? (2) <M02> There were five of us fire-watching yes. But <ZF1> I <ZF0> I wasn’t on duty

at that particular (3) <M01> Mm. (4) <M02> <tc text=laughs> time. Er (5) <M01> Cos you would be getting older by now wouldn’t you. Er (6) <M02> Yes. Yes. That’s right. Yes. Er that’d be forty-one so I’d be what fifteen and

something. (7) <M01> Yes. Mm. (8) <M02> Mhm. (9) <M01> Erm(10) <M02> Er Sorry yes go on. (11) <M01> Well I mean y there’s all this chaos going on and y <tc text=laughs> (12) <M02> There certainly was. (13) <M01> someway or other your education’s g <tc text=laughs> (14) <M02> Well it

In (4) and (5) the speakers have finished for the moment what they have to sayand are inviting their interlocutor to carry on; the FPs are thus cases ofturnyielding. In (9) and (10) there are two cases of turntaking. When M01 in (9)tries to get in, M02, who does not register his attempt, takes the turn in (10) butthen reacts and apologises for inadvertently interrupting M01.

3. Attracting attention Turn-introductory er is sometimes used to attract attention to oneself and to es-tablish contact:

ukspok00769 With a twenty-four thousand majority that’s the largest majority William Haguehas ever enjoyed in Richmond. He’s about to make his speech now. <M11> Er Mr ReturningOfficer may I be the first to congratulate you on the efficient and expeditious way in whichyou have conducted this count along with all your er assistants.

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ukmags00369 I always used to spend Easter at home with my parents, and every time for fiveyears I promised myself I was going to tell them. The first Easter I started out saying Er. Mum,Dad, you know in Leviticus before I decided that maybe that wasn’t the right approach.

ukmags00716 If you ever wake up and find yourself in Nashville, pick up a couple of discs atLucy’s and get out of town before sundown. Either that or buy a gun and shoot yourself inthe head. (Er, Jon, what did you go to Nashville for in the first place? – Ed)

times60316 Er, I suppose the second half is much like the first?’ a tweedy old gentlemanasked me in the interval

ukbooks00010 A dog the size of a horse stared at me with less than ecstasy. Er, hello,’ Isaid.

bbc01015 I headed for the author of ‘Midnight’s Children’ who was surrounded by a couple ofdozen aspiring intellectuals. Er, Mr Rushdie, I squawked – any illusion of intimacy vanishingin the process.

It is obvious that the hesitation element in cases of this kind is normally negligible.

4. Highlighting In the preceding section we saw that FPs could be used by the speaker to at-tract attention to himself or herself. A related significant function of er(m) isthat of focusing the listener’s attention on an important, semantically heavy ele-ment in the delivery that is about to follow. That this is so is suggested byQuinting’s (1971) data, which indicate that filled pauses occur more frequentlybefore lexical words than before function words (43-6). Cf. Stenström (1990:‘One often gets the impression, when listening to the recording, that the speak-er inserts a pause before or after a particular word or string of words to obtaina certain emphatic effect rather than using pauses as linguistic demarcators (andfor breathing)’. This indication of importance can have the effect of giving extraprominence to the following word(s), a sort of verbal italics, inverted commasor semantic booster. The FP highlights the following element, suggests that it isbeing chosen circumspectly and focuses the listener’s attention on it. Comparethe use of er(m) not (V b). Infrequent words are particularly likely to be pre-ceded by an er(m):

sunnow80514 THIS is the moment Godzilla sets foot in and, er, ON New York.ukspok01513 They’re very er empathetic to <ZF1> any <ZF0> any problems that are around.ukspok00363 we are still at quite a erm rudimentary stage in terms of making use of P A Sukspok00049 these curious supports which support this er curvilinear cornice in this case today40526 translate that into something more, er, tangible, so to speak ukspok00025 that they’re much more er discriminatory about how we use petrol ukspok00032 for six hours after the er aromatherapy. ukspok00034 I think the last things he did was his er collages. <F0X> That’s probably what fin-

ished him off. ukspok00037 I’ve talked about er erm anaemia <tc text=pause> because we all women who are

menstruating tend to be anaemic.ukspok00037 I’d say w er erm erm holistic medicine is concerned with body mind emotions and

soul. ukspok00040 and well they’re resins actually erm or er rosemary for example

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Repeated uses of highlighting er(m) are found in:

ukspok00040 Erm and then the quality of the oils going <ZF1> into <ZF0> into the erm organsand the bloodstream you can actually treat things like erm acid stomach or <ZGY> itchybowel <ZG0> <ZGY> liver er migraines erm sciatica lumbago.

In addition to drawing attention to an important point or even the main pointof the argument, the er(m) will alert the listener to implications and innuendosin the text that s/he might not otherwise have been aware of. It is often an ap-peal to the listener to accept the word or phrase in the present context despiteits apparent inappropriateness:

ukmags0351 That’s not a very, er, liberal attitude. I will probably sell records, buttimes60203 Comic writers are, er, Punch-drunk with excitement.ukmags0626 It’s a laughable spectacle to behold, especially when one of them, er, tosses himself

off the stage ukmags0722 that: talent. Oh, and don’t forget the er, um confidence. ukspok762 people are more open … now than they were … forty years ago. It was sort of very

er hush-hush

Quite often the FP in this way precedes an ironic and disapproving understatement:

ukmags00456 Who knows what damage they could have done if they’d used Vinnie’s er, uniqueinterpretation of Woolly Bully a recent release on Cherry Red?

ukmags0716 The original lines are delivered in German, that harshest and most ponderous oftongues. In tandem with the band’s, er, distinctive music, the effect is much like being be-laboured about the head with a wet towel stuffed full of rivets.

ukmags0337 You’d better come over, there’s been a slight, er, mishap My friends’ two dogs –normally so well behaved – had …

ukmags0716 Belly are touring the country and garnering plaudits from all sides with their – er –songs.

ukmags00686 Sidi Bou Said are probably going to get up the noses of a fair few people with the,er, unorthodox way they treat the Great British Pop Song

5. CorrectionAnother function of FPs is that of serving as a correction marker in repairs andreformulations, indicating that a more correct or more suitable word or phrasethan the one(s) just said will follow. The speaker may have produced or be inthe middle of producing an incorrect pronunciation, a factually or linguistical-ly incorrect word, a socially unsuitable form, a syntactic error, etc., which hewishes to correct (Levelt 1989: Ch. 12). Cf. ‘Hesitation proper’, V c 1.

today40415 Chancellor Kenneth Clarke yesterday revealed a new upbeat business survey by an-alysts Dun and Bradsheet, er Dun and Bradmore, oh, yes Dun and Bradstreet.

times51101 As a birthday tribute, we present a major exploita er, adaptation. ukspok0005 What we should have done you know when we er when he was doing the plaits was

show him the beadsukspok0013 he’s married to the woman er this woman who’s acting in the playukspok0015 anything in the city bigger than a garage in your own hou er gardenukspok1437 this was an example of a very er a fairly elementary example of ukspok00025 I think I will just do a er make a quick quote actually ukspok00025 and it’s causing a lot of er it’s causing more sprawl and spread.

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ukspok00019 governments have been spending er consuming more than their incomeukspok0015 The education service in the country genuine erm er generally now is wrestling with

these enormous difficultiesukspok00015 one of the problems of Birmingham as a destina i er as a conference destination is

the city and the image it has internationally.ukspok00015 there’s an opportunity to go to three day sem er sorry not three days a free day’s

seminar in Stafford

A more comprehensive type of correction occurs when the speaker wants to re-cast a whole sentence or perhaps to change tack completely. In these situations,as when the correction applies to just one word or part of a word, er(m) sig-nals that the immediately preceding sequence should be disregarded (and, some-times, that the speaker has finished floundering and will pull himself/herselftogether). It is obvious that such an indication is very helpful to the listener; itcan be a decisive element in his interpretation of the message.28 In a Chomskyanframework, ‘both hearer and analyst are able to assign a structural descriptionto the competence sentence assumed to underlie the performance utterance’(Taylor and Cameron 1987: 129). Even if it is not always the case that the FPwill show which out of several possible interpretations is the correct one, it willin any case indicate that the speaker is undertaking a revision of his or her ut-terance, and that the listener should take notice of the change.

ukspok0052 But nice to have you with us on the show. <F06> Yes well I am a er every night Ilisten and I love it.

ukspok00016 They range in size snakes from <ZF1> ti <ZF0> tiny thread snakes which are nolonger than like three inches up to er you get the er giant green anaconda which exceeds thirty-five feet.

ukspok00019 I think it was a better er since we could do this I thought it was better not to sortof try and manage everything

ukspok00015 the Lord Mayor’s Show which I thought last year was terrific actually <ZF1> and<ZF0> and very charismatic and a very er you know especially the show at the end of theevening in the square I thought it was terrific.

VI. Overlap and structuring effect of functionsEr(m) is commonly used to show hesitation. There is quite naturally an elementof hesitation in many of its other functions, which overlap to a certain extent.The functions are not always easy to distinguish, and several of them are some-times carried out simultaneously. It is clear, for example, that the beginning ofa turn often coincides with an attempt to attract attention. Highlighting andhesitation functions may well co-occur, as in

ukspok00021 It’s a Times recipe for <tc text=pause> er er <ZF1> ked <ZF0> kedgeree there.It’s a type of rice.

ukspok00025 <F0X> There’s a <ZF1> swima er <ZF0> swimathon <F0X> Yeah. <F0X>that’s what I saw

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28 Cf. Taylor and Cameron (1987: 132): ‘… it seems possible to conclude that there are proce-dures which guide the hearer in establishing which competence sentence (or “target sentence”)a discontinuous utterance is to be matched with’.

Other simultaneous functions could be e.g. highlighting + correction, as in

sunnow80529 Cribbing from my blimmin’ cuts job, er, interview with Drew Barrymore.

One language element that works in unison with FPs is prosody. This feature isnot recorded in the Cobuild Corpus and has consequently not been taken intoaccount here. It is, however, likely to play an important part in helping listen-ers to distinguish related functions of er(m)29 and to make use of the result intheir interpretation of the message.

Looking back, we have seen that er and erm not only serve to indicate hesi-tation, the stock dictionary characterisation, but also have important functionsin conversation. By marking off thought units in the spoken utterance theymake the intended structural elements plain to the listener. Although the FPscannot be relied upon to occur consistently in an utterance, they are frequentenough and help to demarcate key structural units in the exposition: words,phrases and clauses. Their role in the interchange of conversational turns is es-sential; they provide a mechanism for what is often a smooth and effortless ex-change of views. Other functions that FPs carry out, like catching someone’sattention, focusing the listener’s attention on significant elements in the utter-ance, or correcting part of the utterance, are also important elements in thefunctional set-up of the FP, elements that structure the message for the listenerand prepare the way for his understanding of it. In addition to helping thespeaker in organising his utterance by providing thinking time, FPs thereforealso help to organise the utterance for the listener, who will more easily realiseits structure and its main point and be able to follow the argument withoutbeing detained by potential ambiguities and side-issues. One could draw a par-allel with two types of lecture. A lecture that is read aloud from the written pageis often difficult to take in when its delivery lacks the verbal guides and sign-posts that we more or less subconsciously expect to find in speech; as listenerswe are in danger of missing the point of the argument. On the other hand, a lec-ture that is delivered more freely without direct recourse to a written manuscriptis easier to follow, precisely because of the presence of such assisting elements.

VII. Conclusion. Er(m) is not a ‘word’ in the sense that it is understood and handled as such. In-deed, this is evident in the very choice of the anomalous term ‘filled pause’.30

Imagine a situation where speaker A has said ‘I am, er, overwhelmed’ and isasked by speaker B to repeat what he just said. A’s natural response would notbe (i) ‘I am, er, overwhelmed’, but rather (ii) ‘I am overwhelmed’. Both speak-ers would regard (ii) as an adequate response, simply because neither of themwould probably have been aware of the FP in the first place and would not inany case have regarded it as a word or as being part of the utterance. This

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29 Cf. the comments on turnholding and turnyielding, above.30 Sinclair (1987 b): ‘A pause is a moment of silence that occurs when a sound, for example

speech or music, stops before beginning again …’ [My emphasis. GK.]

points to an important characteristic of our FPs: they operate partly below thelevel of consciousness and can therefore be an unobtrusive and effective instru-ment in facilitating spoken interaction.

Since we are most of the time unaware of the so-called FPs, their (moderate)use will not normally affect adversely our impression of a speaker’s fluency31 oreloquence. On the contrary, they are most of the time guiding and lubricatingelements that facilitate communication. Cf. the advice in Aspects of Translation(1958): ‘The really astute Englishman … must feign a certain diffident hesita-tion, put in a few well-placed -ers.’32 Those markers are integral elements, im-portant and sometimes even indispensable, in spoken delivery.

Göteborg University, English Dept., GÖRAN KJELLMER

Box 200SE 405 30 GöteborgSweden

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(eds). Linguistic Disorders and Pathologies: An International Handbook. Berlin. pp. 46-52.GOLDMAN-EISLER, F., A. SKARBEK & A. HENDERSON 1965. ‘Cognitive and neurochemical de-

termination of sentence structure’. Language and Speech 8: 86-94.GOVE, PHILIP BABCOCK (ed.) 1971. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English

Language. Springfield, Mass.HOWELL, RICHARD W., and HAROLD J. VETTER 1976. Language in Behavior. New York.LEVELT, WILLEM J. M. 1989. Speaking. From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, Mass., and

London.

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31 That which we refer to by ‘the term fluency is not a facet of ideal speech behaviour uninter-rupted by hesitancy. It is rather a relative measure of a speaker’s ability to avoid numerousand very long pauses’. Raupach (1978), quoted from Albépart-Ottesen (2000: 176).

32 OED s.v. er.-

LONDON-LUND CORPUS, see ALTENBERG (1991).MACLAY, H., and C. E. OSGOOD 1959. ‘Hesitation Phenomena in Spontaneous English Speech’.

Word 15: 19-44.NODE = PEARSALL, JUDY (ed.) 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford.OED = SIMPSON, J. A., and WEINER, E. S. C. (eds.) 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd

ed. Oxford. POYATOS, FERNANDO 1993. Paralanguage. Amsterdam/Philadelphia.QUINTING, GERD 1971. Hesitation Phenomena in Adult Aphasic and Normal Speech. The Hague

and Paris.QUIRK, RANDOLPH, et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London &

New York.RAYSON, PAUL, GEOFFREY LEECH and MARY HODGES 1997. ‘Social Differentiation in the Use

of English Vocabulary: Some Analyses of the Conversational Component of the British Na-tional Corpus.’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: 2: 1, 133-52.

SINCLAIR, J. MCH. (ed.) 1987 a. Looking up. An Account of the COBUILD Project in LexicalComputing. London and Glasgow.

SINCLAIR, JOHN MCH. (ed.) 1987 b. Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. London &Glasgow.

STENSTRÖM, ANNA-BRITA 1984. Questions and responses in English conversation. Lund Studies inEnglish 68. Lund.

STENSTRÖM, ANNA-BRITA 1990. ‘Pauses in monologue and dialogue’. In SVARTVIK, JAN (ed.) TheLondon-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. Lund Studies in English 82. pp. 211-52.

TAYLOR, TALBOT J., and DEBORAH CAMERON 1987. Analysing Conversation. Rules and Units inthe Structure of Talk. Oxford, etc.

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Appendix. Tables.

Table 1. Frequency of er(m) in Cobuild(a) er:

Corpus Total number of Average number peroccurrences million words

ukspok 97580 10523.5/millionukmags 136 27.7/millionsunnow 156 26.8/millionoznews 117 21.9/millionusbooks 80 14.2/millionukbooks 76 14.2/milliontoday 70 13.3/milliontimes 74 12.8/millionbbc 10 3.8/millionukephem 11 3.5/millionusephem 4 3.3/millionnpr 1 0.3/million

(b) erm:

Corpus Total number of Average number peroccurrences million words

ukspok 83918 9050.1/milliontoday 84 16.0/millionukmags 56 11.4/milliontimes 60 10.4/millionbbc 18 6.9/millionukephem 5 1.6/millionsunnow 7 1.2/millionoznews 4 0.7/millionukbooks 2 0.4/millionusbooks 0 0.0/millionusephem 0 0.0/millionnpr 0 0.0/million

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Table 2. Preposition and er(a) er+INVicky on a Caribbean beach. Er at least that’s what it looks like in</c> Would you mind pulling over sir? ER, on second thoughts Last year’sthe moment Godzilla sets foot in and, er, ON New York. Our exclusive picturethe latest issue of Hello! magazine. Er, except the carpet is bloodstainedwas the writing of an English course. Er at the end of nineteen-eighty-six thearts are. Of course it’s the C B S O er into which the city puts a lot ofthe money to be crude about it. <ZGY> Er throughout the eighties and a lot ofwere a lot of plans <ZF1> in the <ZF0> er in the second half of the eightiesthrust of my programme erm we open now er on April fifteenth and I what I’mclubs the choral rich choral tradition er of amateur music making. We don’t‡in the U K that’s gonna ha apart from er in London that’s going to have alarge number of guests to the city and er in great style and at great expense.only partially-employed actors er in some kind of theatrical version offor me because I you know not working er on the artistic side of it and <ZF1>infrastructure <ZF1> we <ZF0> we er in N E C I C C terms is that I don’tI mean <ZF1> you’re <ZF0> you’re er into a very sort of happy and relaxedflight <ZGY> times who’d rather go er by car and so you should actuallyEr the four person debate competitions er within the area kicks off on Monday<ZF1> that er that <ZF0> that meeting er on the second of er March er pleasethat er <ZF1> that <ZF0> that meeting er on the second of er March er pleaseinformation again there’s a form here er at the front. Erm the sixth of Aprildid. <M0X> Have you been bitten er er at all? <M01> Yeah. <ZGY> tonightall snakes yeah. All snakes feed er er on meat are carnivorous every speciesand nothing happened he actually died er during that day. And the next day thestuff from North America which tends er for some reason North Americanand as I say that erm will be analyzed er in another course. So this coursefree up on the eleventh floor er in Margaret’s office. Er it’s ait’s the nineteen eighty nine report er on the financial system not thein fact I’m hoping to get it to you er in the week after next erm and so ifof the reading erm should be useful er for your er projects I think. Nowon er and read this revised first part er within the next erm week or twoif you don’t read it so read it er in conjunction with the class er withit er in conjunction with the class er with the lectures on Tuesday and<M02> Er they will do examinations er in January <ZGY> Sir? <M01> Welland erm Diane Horton who was in here er at the beginning er is very good ateconomic development in many countries er towards more reliance on the private‡career looking at er the flow of funds er in Turkey and erm this was in theand buy <ZF1> a er <ZF0> a stock er in the direct markets. There’s ermpooling diversification reduces risk er to each individual saver and indeedmany cases banks make short term loans er for trade and in many countries theybetween lending and deposit rates er in fact the operating costs are plusto do with and has no effect at all er on the world as a whole or on ermcountries and everybody else er with the substantial rise in interester even allowing for inflation. Then er during the twentieth century thethis diagram here where we what we had er at the beginning saving andable to make choices themselves. Also er in a number of countries er they havehad extreme difficulties in getting er er in using the judicial system toreclaim er money that they are owed. Er in some cases of course er there’sto collect any erm interest accrued er during the delay and perhaps evenbe political influence brought to bear er in some cases. In other cases you may

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GÖRAN KJELLMER

(b) IN+erShand – an inside leg measurement of, er, 38 and a 48-inch chest, he is ashielding her nose from the heat of er, St Tropez Is it ’eck as like.undergraduates all about the world of er tennis. Becker plans to make anbusiness, while Glasgow will go for, er, the big international business. day of interviews. That was after – er – a long day – ah,’ a ricochet ofSongbooks. This is transmitted on, er, Radio 2. Whatever the reasonscan think of Get away! How about er that one about the safety pin; camea new word can be added that ends in er able, or ation. Some words can makebit perturbed and says It’s about er people toeing the line, playing fairby the hosts and we finished in, er, fourth place. but what the hell, atyou don’t really come, you sort of, er, bring it all back up inside you our inscrutable chums plumped for, er, Titanic. There is, however, no truthThis smug and stupid show tried to, er, have it both ways. Look at thesein ahead of him. Valle was signed from er, Walsall and had a completelystands in his way. Kidman gets to, er, look worried. The plot whizzes alongthe town with the biggest swinger in, er, Bromley are drawing to a close. Forbut we’ve never ejected him for, er, anything else.’ WHO ELSE GOES IN?into a World Cup within a World Cup by er, us, the Lightning Seeds singer doesn’I’m compiling for the University of, er, Life. To catch the full spiritualityThe Tall Paul remix has loads of, er, fizz. This reminds you what a greatclub Cafe de Paris is launching in, er, Paris with a massive party on aknew you had something to get back to er no because I saw it at the cinemaSo what’s it about? <M0X> It’s about er modern hero rescues <ZGY> <F0X> Yeah.and it came up so loud it was sort of er just like a <ZGY> tape recorder wasI got it <ZG0> <ZGY> <ZG1> to within er <ZG0> <F01> Dave said `It’s Grahamin Parliament one of the sort of er <ZF1> the er <ZF0> the <ZF1> wo <ZF0>it. And Andrew will talk about er <ZGY> City Hall. And <ZF1> I <ZF0> Iof investment the city makes through er <ZF1> other <ZF0> other things thatsay just a couple of words about to er exemplify that and then I’ll talkthat and then I’ll talk about er the City of Culture <ZGY> ThisE C and we’re trying to apply them to er I C C Symphony Hall and N I A asmoment ground rules have been going up er you know <ZGY> this is Symphony Hall’Marketing <ZF1> we <ZF0> we liaise at er various levels of er activity. Sowe liaise at er various levels of er activity. So what we’re going to have‡in the U K that’s gonna ha apart from er in London that’s going to have all <ZF0> you’ll all be coming across er erm me and my development manager andthe rest of the I C C we spent about er thirty-two or three million in thethere was some sort of sense <ZF1> of er <ZF0> of planning. You know if differconflict erm with the arena taking out er I mean if I was working in Nottinghamworried at all about the demand for er these? <M0X> <ZF1> That’s <ZF0> that’tell you one thing that I knew about er I mean it a lot of venues <ZF1> ingoing but I mean the general sort of er the main thoroughfares er the Broadof there’s a whole idea <ZF1> of of er <ZF0> of recreation which has got towhen the question I was about to er launch at you has just been answereder elements <ZF1> of of <ZF0> of er international <ZGY> I think thelooking forward to erm taking part in er or attending your cost centre later‡<ZF0> that meeting er on the second of er March er please <ZF1> let <ZF0> lethave some opportunities that exist in er going to the United Nations buildingto the United Nations building in er America erm the one that you’ve allso if anyone wants a night out to er have a go at knocking hell out of all

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Table 3. Not and er(a) Er + nottimes51104 amily show this Christmas? Er, not a lot, as he complained lasttimes51118 ss hysteria among workers. Er not quite. On Friday, chemicals aretimes60106 yone can do that. Er, not quite. Actually there will be 35ukmags00462 /c> Football of confusion? Er, not quite Des! The shape of thingsukmags00716 reets yet? NIKI HUGGY: Er-not exactly. But there is a queue ofukmags00824 Our Tone Tony Adams. But, er not Tony Adams the footballerukspok00005 <ZG0> quite a bit. Is that er not too short? <F0X> That’s lovely.ukspok00005 eighed now <tc text=pause> er not now this minute <F0X> <ZGY> whatukspok00015 a whole range of music erm er not just the classical music becauseukspok00020 erm now this is obviously er not a bank we want to be associatedukspok00037 r on okay? <tc text=pause> Er not many people realize that er wellukspok00045 not enough places to play. Er not enough encouragement for youngukspok00045 lion dollars you know. And er not so long ago my other daughter she’ukspok00048 see I need to publicize it er not to draw attention to myself butukspok00048 should be allowed really. Er not I’m not speaking to youukspok00050 thy at all eh Geoff? <M09> Er not no well you know it’s a bitukspok00056 My friend er was in er Tes er not Tesco’s in er the market theukspok00056 I think it’s all a bit of er not telling us anything we didn’tukspok00060 Carthy on Radio Nottingham er not too long ago about having er aukspok00062 er <ZF0> and Henry Cooper er not Henry Cooper <tc text=pause>ukspok00065 e-armed anyway. <F04> Oh w er not no. We were <M01> Well <ZF1> weukspok00067 ch. <F03> <tc text=laughs> Er not sorry. Dutch. <M01> Oh Dutch. Ohukspok00068 handle. <M01> Yeah. <F05> Er not I don’t mean to say that er they’ukspok00072 be one that if Frazer does er not come through fitness wise I thinkukspok00080 ient speedy legal recourse er not only may the court procedures mayukspok00085 1> is <ZF0> is er you know er not enough information. If you lookukspok00093 ve any bonus shares? <F07> Er not as far as I know we haven’tukspok00094 without them er especially er not only am I responsible forukspok00098 y ought to be talked about er not just pit bulls you know these bigukspok00109 w far do you travel? <F02> Er not very far I suppose about a mileukspok00111 u think you’ve done? <M09> Er not too bad. <M01> Mm. <M09> Yes erukspok00113 of into Kent at all? <M10> Er not no <ZF1> I’ve <ZF0> I’ve neverukspok00160 nd its accompanying error. Er not a particularly strong note thisukspok00160 rentice Shelleyans reading er not a poem to er run with before youukspok00162 ruled out er Alan Buckley er not a snowball hell in hell’s chanceukspok00164 n’s gone as well and maybe er not such <ZF1> a <ZF0> a blow. Louukspok00181 which Spanish extended er er not merely in seventeen-thirty-eightukspok00181 pean and in due course erm er not merely Latin er European butukspok00220 c text=laughs> <M0X> <ZGY> er not <ZGY> yet but one of our featuresukspok00222 spoken <F0X> Mm. <M0X> but er not what the general public regardsukspok00222 better to <tc text=pause> er not to think of me for this meetingukspok00222 measure things is probably er not realistic. I think that erm weukspok00239 ou at the time <ZGY> <M0X> Er not really. <ZGY> <F0X> Mm. He’sukspok00239 one of the songs I think. Er not maybe not Twelfth Night <M0X>ukspok00285 ht understand. The pill is er not available. It’s seen as beingukspok00294 goes this is er a falling er not a spinning rocket and this is aukspok00294 egin to teach them to read er not only at seven or eight but theyukspok00316 . <M0X> the other stuff is er not anywhere else I don’t think. Ermukspok00340 uite the same though is it er not having the two days off together.ukspok00342 aps George’s departure may er not have been not just from Victoria

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(b) Not + erukspok00003 ? <F0X> Mm. <M0X> It’s not er Advocaat is or anything avocadoukspok00013 at off <tc text=laugh> not er partaking myself as well of courseukspok00022 utput exceeds input or not er if it’s durable then you willukspok00032 <F01> Because I am not er doing it as a practitioner for clientukspok00033 hether you enjoy it or not er from the question <ZF1> ofukspok00039 hat but of course it’s not er electric but I use it for casserolingukspok00050 No. <M03> Mind you I’m not er I would think it was a good idea toukspok00050 you should you should not er perpetuate these things and rake upukspok00058 I say I mean gaffe or not er <M05> I mean <M01> what are socialukspok00061 <tc text=pause> <ZGY> not er <ZGY> I mean we just get on smashing.ukspok00067 ZF1> I’m I’m <ZF0> I’m not er seeking to make too much of a partyukspok00069 use> er probably <ZF1> not er <ZF0> not much chance for a meal butukspok00072 om that because we are not er a game that throws up sort of starukspok00080 world <ZF1> not <ZF0> not er just in developing countries but inukspok00081 because you know it’s not er a <ZF1> ter <ZF0> terrific investmentukspok00081 d you know er that has not er <tc text=cough> that’s not somethingukspok00081 ilization they’re just not er able to mobilize resourcesukspok00085 one but obviously it’s not er it’s not something that people areukspok00087 ans that er things are not er allowed to er lend to the privateukspok00092 to unite. And this is not er a lecture about Macbeth so I’ll notukspok00100 lot erm I think so I’m not er I think the er marriage contract wellukspok00101 now make plough shares not er bombs and guns. <M01> Yeah. <M09> Butukspok00102 ot yet <ZF1> not <ZF0> not er yes I do actually because it’s comingukspok00102 uences <ZF1> not <ZF0> not er to feel that we are having it shovedukspok00102 wice now and they have not er you know replied to him yet and whatukspok00106 you think it’s fair or not er what you think of the banding er ifukspok00109 fantastic. I mean I am not er er a learner as such I used to ride aukspok00115 about <ZF1> not <ZF0> not er having corporal punishment withukspok00163 23> Erm I’m afraid I’m not er optimistic. I don’t share yourukspok00220 ZF1> that’s not that’s not er <ZF0> that’s not controversial. Ermukspok00220 unks <F0X> Yeah. <M0X> not er <F0X> So my question is I supposeukspok00224 I mean the entries are not er all grammatical. They can be thingsukspok00224 Okay then well that’s not er <F0X> <tc text=laughs> <F0X> Wellukspok00251 feel that the data is not er good <M0X> Just leave the whole <ZGY>ukspok00272 ainted on plaster it’s not er a fresco painting now but it’sukspok00285 nist, you know Does it not er <ZF1> in <ZF0> in some way say thatukspok00285 n that <ZF1> not <ZF0> not er the Tory party and the government theukspok00316 ly. <M0X> one form and not er <F0X> Yes. <M0X> any of the othersukspok00339 University. <F01> But not er book publishing <M0X> Book publishingukspok00340 ’t think. <M01> You’re not er immune from it no. <F01> No. No.ukspok00340 01> Yeah. <M01> He was not er cross he was worried about the jobukspok00354 ir relationships. It’s not er a biographical play it’s a play aboutukspok00355 esn’t mean to say it’s not er Dionysian. Think of Johnson <M01>ukspok00358 of them. Erm and it’s not er anecdotal characters er I mean <ZF1>ukspok00358 e’s not sh <ZF0> she’s not er declamatory she’s not she doesn’tukspok00392 y students. I suspect not. Er but er yes. Computer clubs. Erm inukspok00393 ny <ZG0> different or not. Er this was my first reaction was thisukspok00394 ssion about whether or not er this erm principle is the only one.ukspok00394 evelop Central Asia if not er the eastern regions of the R S F S R.ukspok00394 d the richer parts er not. Er again and this is the final point I’m

197


Table 4. Collocates of er and erm

(a) 20 top collocates of er (t-score)

Occurrences T-scoreer 21884 138.828632<ZF1> 17259 117.872371<ZF0> 16292 113.714135<M01> 15222 104.406793I 22671 95.737439<tc text=pause> 9467 89.182198erm 9190 83.839557<M02> 8255 79.992893<F01> 10321 79.983159you 14669 69.867794<ZGY> 7692 68.832395yeah 6932 66.830810know 5821 57.956489yes 4525 56.856985mm 4921 55.765554<F02> 4456 51.346307that 13956 49.143451it 13458 47.081710well 3940 43.696858mx 2380 43.672111

(b) 20 top collocates of erm (t-score)

Occurrences T-score<tc text=pause> 14357 114.179285<M01> 15621 108.954526<F01> 15133 107.740904I 21477 98.329634<ZF1> 12080 96.095677<ZF0> 10089 85.296407er 9190 83.839557<ZGY> 8332 75.759139you 14052 73.722165yeah 7549 73.410267mm 6771 71.789610<M02> 6417 69.558844<F02> 6420 69.137949erm 6224 66.385119know 5033 54.061958yes 3947 53.283387right 4191 51.031463<F0X> 4182 49.819408think 4031 49.228431so 5190 48.095860

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GÖRAN KJELLMER

Documents

Hesitation. In Defence of ER and ERM