Gluing relationships as impairment increases: Pauses, fillers, placeholders and formulaicity in Alzheimer’s discourse

Davis, Boyd; Maclagan, Margaret

doi:10.1075/tsl.93.09dav

In:Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders
Edited by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis and Margaret Maclagan
[Typological Studies in Language 93] 2010
► pp. 189–216

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download Book PDF

Pauses, fillers, placeholders and formulaicity in Alzheimer’s discourse

Gluing relationships as impairment increases

Boyd Davis | University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Margaret Maclagan | University of Canterbury

Published online: 29 September 2010

https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.93.09dav

Extracts from the speech of three women with Alzheimer’s Disease are analyzed in order to highlight functions of pauses, fillers, placeholders, and formulaic phrases. Although other features of their speech decline, placeholders, fillers and formulaic sequences are still used appropriately and help cement interaction by providing appropriate cues to the conversational partner. The analysis is placed within the context of analyses of pauses in disordered conversations. Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, pauses, fillers, placeholders, formulaicity

Cited by (16)

Cited by 16 other publications

Order by:

Kuroshima, Satomi, Blagoja Dimoski, Yuri Jody Yujobo, Rasami Chaikul & Tricia Okada

2025. 221Chapter 14 Disfluency in ELF encounters. In Developing ELF Programmes for Language Teaching, ► pp. 221 ff.

Song, Lu

2024. Linguistic Studies on Persons with Dementia (1993–2023): A Bibliometric Analysis. In Language, Aging and Society, ► pp. 169 ff.

Milana, Shkhanukova

2023. 2023 IEEE 21st World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics (SAMI), ► pp. 000103 ff.

Schneider, Carolin

2023. Understanding the Continuum of Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type and Communication Profiles in Its Context. In An Ethno-Social Approach to Code Choice in Bilinguals Living with Alzheimer’s, ► pp. 7 ff.

Schneider, Carolin

2023. The (Linguistic) Tapestry of the Dataset—Exploring Participation, Direction, Topic, and Language Choices. In An Ethno-Social Approach to Code Choice in Bilinguals Living with Alzheimer’s, ► pp. 127 ff.

Schneider, Carolin & Besa Qalaj

2023. “¿Cómo te sientes? – With my butt!”: code-choice-related humor in bilingual speakers living with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Journal of Language and Aging Research 1:1 ► pp. 27 ff.

Nasreen, Shamila, Morteza Rohanian, Julian Hough & Matthew Purver

2021. Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition From Spontaneous Speech Using Disfluency and Interactional Features. Frontiers in Computer Science 3

Bolly, Catherine T., George Christodoulides & Anne Catherine Simon

2016. Disfluences et vieillissement langagier. De la base de données VALIBEL aux corpus outillés en français parlé. Corpus :15

Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana

2015. Formulaic Language in an Emergentist Framework. In The Handbook of Language Emergence, ► pp. 578 ff.

Peter Elwood & Wray, Alison

2012. Patterns of formulaic language in Alzheimer's disease: implications for quality of life. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults 13:3 ► pp. 168 ff.

Wray, Alison

2011. Formulaic Language as a Barrier to Effective Communication with People with Alzheimer's Disease. The Canadian Modern Language Review 67:4 ► pp. 429 ff.

Wray, Alison

2012. What Do We (Think We) Know About Formulaic Language? An Evaluation of the Current State of Play. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 32 ► pp. 231 ff.

Wray, Alison

2017. The Language of Dementia Science and the Science of Dementia Language. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36:1 ► pp. 80 ff.

Wray, Alison

2020. The Dynamics of Dementia Communication,

Wray, Alison

2024. Formulaic Sequences and Language Disorders. In The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics, Second Edition, ► pp. 177 ff.

[no author supplied]

2021. References. In Foundations of Familiar Language, ► pp. 386 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.