The Hourglass

I was browsing some blogs recently when I happened upon this post by Tigerhawk. He noticed the following AP headline and lede.

House Democrats to unveil Iraq war plan

In a direct challenge to President Bush, House Democrats are advancing legislation requiring the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the fall of next year.

He objects to the title because the democrats' proposal is not a war plan but rather a retreat plan. One commenter, Shochu John, takes the view that the headline sounds fine: "It means plan regarding the Iraq war, no?" This is an interesting difference of opinion. Whose interpretation is correct? Well, linguistically, both of them.

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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.

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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.

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