Speech is Silver, but Silence is Golden: Some Remarks on the Function(s) of Pauses

Abstract

This paper explores additional functions that can be attached to pauses in speech. While traditional concepts have focused on pauses as boundary markers for delimiting purposes and hesitation pauses as signalling the process of planning on the speaker's side, it is worth assuming that pauses can also be used as stylistic devices in order to increase the sense of anticipation on the hearer's side with regard to the information to follow. Drawing on an innovative descriptive model which is based on the identification of the prosodic and syntactic status at tone unit boundaries in the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (LLC), this type of pause will be exemplified and functionally analysed. Thus it will be shown that those pauses in speech which are not mere hesitation pauses may, on the one hand, fulfill a segmenting function, but also, on the other hand, a distinctive non-segmenting communicative function: this second function is subsumed under the notion of anticipation pauses.