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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. 272–296

Exploring the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers

The role of gaze and gesture

ORCID logo | Université Paris Nanterre

The present study aims to explore the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers by taking into account their accompanying visual and gestural behavior. This aspect has not yet been widely explored, and the current study breaks new ground by demonstrating that the analysis of gaze and gesture can shed substantial light on the pragmatic functions of filled pauses and other pausing phenomena. Filled pauses (FPs) serve several pragmatic functions in speech, mainly planning but also turn-holding and emphasis, and their use is also highly determined by register and setting. This research explores the different pragmatic functions of FPs by analyzing their distribution in two different communication settings (conversation vs presentation setting), combining a quantitative and a qualitative methodology, following Kosmala & Crible’s (2021) study on the same data. Particular attention was paid to the co-occurring gestural activity of uh/ums and gaze behavior. Analyses show that the pragmatic functions of FPs are also embodied in kinetic activities which differ according to the setting: more pragmatic and referential ones were found during FPs in conversation than in the presentation setting, as well as more eye-contact, which reflects their potential communicative role during interactional sequences.

Keywords: filled pauses, gesture, multimodality, face-to-face interactions, register variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Filled pauses, disfluency, and multimodality
  • 3.Theoretical background and research questions
  • 4.Data and methodology
    • 4.1Corpus under study
    • 4.2Methods
  • 5.Quantitative results
    • 5.1Overview of the data
    • 5.2Gesture and gaze behavior during filled pauses: Differences between the two settings
  • 6.Qualitative analyses
    • 6.1Filled pauses as planners: Evidence from the two settings
    • 6.2Filled pauses as time-buying strategies: Attending to other relevant activities in multimodal talk
    • 6.3Filled pauses as intersubjective markers used for turn-taking
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21020.kos
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