Clark Herbert H, Fox Tree Jean E
Department of Psychology, Building 420, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2130, USA.
Cognition. 2002 May;84(1):73-111. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00017-3.
The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in "and-uh"), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.
这里所探讨的观点是，说话者使用“呃”和“嗯”来表明他们即将开始一段他们预期为短暂（呃）或较长（嗯）的停顿。说话者可以依次利用这些表明来暗示，例如，他们正在寻找一个单词、决定接下来要说什么、想要继续发言或者想要放弃发言权。该观点的证据来自几个大型的自然语言语料库。证据表明，说话者会监测他们即将出现的、值得一提的停顿的言语计划。当他们发现这样的停顿时，他们会制定停顿的位置和方式、使用哪个词（“呃”或“嗯”）、是否将其作为附着词附加到前一个单词上（如“and-uh”）以及是否延长停顿。论点是“呃”和“嗯”是传统的英语单词，说话者对它们的规划、制定和使用方式与其他任何单词无异。
