Uhm… The use of hesitation markers on the social media platform X in Dutch and Spanish

The status of hesitation markers or filled pauses (e.g., eh, uhm) is debated, with some claiming that these forms merely signal disfluencies or delays in conversation, while others argue that they are lexical items. Although more common in oral communication, hesitation markers have been attested in written communication too, such as in tweets. Due to the nature of written language, hesitation markers in tweets must be intentionally produced; it follows that they fulfill a pragmatic function. However, not much is known yet about these pragmatic functions. We qualitatively explore the functions of hesitation markers in a corpus of Dutch and Spanish tweets. We not only show that they have a clear pragmatic function, but also that they can have a clear interactive and intersubjective function, in that they comment on the content of the contribution of their interlocutor and how this content conflicts with assumed common knowledge.