Self-repetition in spoken English discourse

The objects of the present paper are, first, to chart the occurrence of selfrepetition in the spoken British module “ukspok” in the Cobuild Corpus, and secondly, to present evidence to show that repetition serves a great number of functions, and that far from being an obstacle it is a helpful and sometimes even necessary ingredient for everyday conversation to be successful. It was found that repetititon is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the spoken language and is very often used in preparation for long and complex sentences. It was also found that men have a much higher rate of repetition-introduced turns than women, and that men’s repetition-introduced sentences are much longer than women’s.