A néma szünetek funkciói a spontán beszédben

Absztrakt

Functions of silent pauses in spontaneous speech
Our speech is occasionally interrupted by pauses of various length. They are an essential part of human speech. Until now it is not clarified, what can be actually considered as pause, how differently pauses can appear in speech, what their acceptable minimum and maximum durations are, and what functions they can carry on in speech.
This study focuses on the analysis of the temporal structure of silent pauses in Hungarian spontaneous speech. We hypothesized that 1. silent pauses would differ from each other according to their functions, 2. various types of silent pauses in terms of frequency and duration would show different patterns, 3. duration of silent pauses would be defined also by the syntactical position.
Silent pauses were categorized into the following categories: 1. phrase boundary pauses, 2. within phrase pauses, 3. end of phrase pauses, 4. utterance onset pauses, 5. editing phases. The subcategories of the editing phases depend on the type of disfluency surrounding the silent pause.
Our results confirm all the three hypotheses. The temporal data supported that the function of silent pauses had a main effect on both their occurrences and their durations, as well.