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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

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

ORCID logo | University of the West of England
ORCID logo | University of Eastern Finland

Even though hesitations (e.g., um/uh) were historically perceived as involuntary non-linguistic items (e.g., Maclay & Osgood 1959), more recently, a number of scholars have suggested that hesitations can behave like (a) lexical items (e.g., Clark & Fox Tree 2002), and (b) at least in some contexts and with some functions as grammatical items like suffixes/clitics (Kirjavainen, Crible & Beeching 2022; Tottie 2017). 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.

Keywords: Finnish discourse particles, tota , planning particles, hesitations
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
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21019.kir
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