The Hourglass

There's a new book out by Michael Erard called Um … Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, And What They Mean … (website, Amazon). I am excited to read it since it has been recommended by Ben Zimmer and Arnold Zwicky is one of the featured (non-fictional) characters in the book. Both of these guys post regularly at Language Log, one of my most frequented blog sites. Furthermore, the author has a Master's in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in English. It's darn near always good when a linguist gets around to writing a book for the broader public. That's not necessarily 'cause the books themselves are always good, but rather because more linguists should try to engage larger audiences than our own narrow in-group. In this case, though, it looks like we have the added bonus that the book is actually good.

Read the rest of this entry »

A stock character in much of the entertainment world is the none-too-bright sidekick of a main character. While there are many formulas for this dimwit, one of the most common features in this stereotype is slow speech with lots of long, drawn-out filled pauses. A classic example—perhaps an archetypal example—is Art Carney's Ed Norton (pictured at right) from The Honeymooners. Other examples abound: Edgar Bergen's Mortimer Snerd, Rev. Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd) in Taxi, Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo) in Welcome Back, Kotter, and George Utley (Tom Poston) in Newhart as well as numerous minor characters whose names few would recognize.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my main research interests is filled pauses in speech (and more recently in writing). I intend to blog a lot about it here, although not exclusively. Nonetheless, in order to get the ball rolling in the context of this blog, I'd like to start by trying to give a definition of a filled pause.

This is one of those problems that seems easy at first. For instance, once I say that filled pauses are things like um and uh in speech, then pretty much everybody knows just what I'm talking about (with strong intuitions from their own personal experience). However, when we approach this problem formally, it turns out not to be so easy. I have a hard time coming up with a nice objective definition of a filled pause, because I almost always end up introducing some subjectivity into it. For instance, one possibility might go as follows.

Definition 1: A filled pause is a conventional—though non-word—expression used to stall for time during the processing of spontaneous speech.

Read the rest of this entry »