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Article published In: Discourse-pragmatic markers, fillers and filled pauses: Pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal and sociolinguistic perspectives
Edited by Kate Beeching, Grant Howie, Minna Kirjavainen and Anna Piasecki
[Pragmatics & Cognition 29:2] 2022
► pp. 370–393

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Investigation into the linguistic category membership of the Finnish planning particle tota

ORCiD logo with link | University of the West of England
ORCiD logo with link | University of Eastern Finland
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21019.kir
Abstract
Even though hesitations (e.g., um/uh) were historically perceived as involuntary non-linguistic items (e.g., Maclay, Howard & Charles E. Osgood. 1959. Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous English speech. Word 151. 19–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), more recently, a number of scholars have suggested that hesitations can behave like (a) lexical items (e.g., Clark, Herbert H. & Jean E. Fox Tree. 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 841. 73–111. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), and (b) at least in some contexts and with some functions as grammatical items like suffixes/clitics (Kirjavainen, Minna, Ludivine Crible & Kate Beeching. 2022. Are filled pauses represented as linguistic items? Investigating the effect of exposure on the perception and production of um. Language and Speech 651. 263–289. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2017. From pause to word: Uh, um and er in written American English. English Language & Linguistics 231. 105–130. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The current study contributes to this body of work and presents two spoken language corpus analyses (frequency analysis; network analysis) investigating the nature of the Finnish planning particle tota. Our results suggest that tota is more similar to grammatical items than lexical items.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background of the present study
    • 2.1Disfluency markers
    • 2.2The linguistic status of filled pauses
    • 2.3The present study
  • 3.Study 1: Distribution of tota vs. ee and öö
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Corpus
      • 3.1.2Analysis
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Study 2: Network analysis
    • 4.1Method
      • 4.1.1Corpus
      • 4.1.2Analysis
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.General discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Belz, Malte
2023. Defining Filler Particles: A Phonetic Account of the Terminology, Form, and Grammatical Classification of “Filled Pauses”. Languages 8:1 ► pp. 57 ff. DOI logo

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