tracywangandbrianpeng.docVIP

Tracy Wang and Brian Peng Professor Nash Introduction to Linguistics December 15, 1988 Pauses Introduction Do pauses play an important role in speaking? Yes, they really do because people need pauses to take a breath, show their hesitation, or prepare to continue speaking. People also pause “at the end of a completed syntactic structure like a phrase or sentence” to show that their turn in the conversation is over (Yule 143). In this report we will discuss pauses in monologues, including their length, location, functions, the use of silence or words in pauses, and the conditions in which pauses are needed. Design In order to collect examples of real pauses, we asked three teachers and four students in the English Department, Fu Jen Catholic University, to discuss one of the following questions: If you were not a teacher anymore, what would you like to do? What is your attitude toward homosexuals and AIDS? The teachers spoke English in their responses, and the students spoke Mandarin. All responses were tape recorded and transcribed, with special attention to pauses. Findings and Discussion According to our recordings and transcriptions, we divide pauses into two types: shorter pauses (around 1 to 3 seconds), and longer pauses (about 4 to 8 seconds). The length of pauses and the conditions in which they occurred seemed to be closely related, in both Mandarin and English (see table 1). Shorter pauses tended to be related to pausing out of habit (two of the speakers paused much more frequently than the others, so that they seem to have a real habit of pausing), pausing to moderate the atmosphere (in order to feel more comfortable discussing a sensitive topic), emphasis, and planning the next thing to say. Longer pauses were associated with thinking, organizing ideas, a lack of ideas to continue speaking with, or a failure to find the right words to continue. Some of the speakers did not like our topics because of their personality or lack of backgro