um…uh…what do you mean?

I’m experiencing some internal conflicts. Namely, there is often a gap between how I want to be spending my time, and how I should be spending my time. One thing I want to be doing is writing for fun. One thing I should be doing is writing for work and school. So sometimes I try to reconcile these by writing for fun and work. So in the interest of reconciliation, I bring you…the filled pause.

As part of my work and study, I do a lot of transcriptions (of various types: orthographic, phonetic and prosodic) of actual speech. (And by speech, I mean people speaking. Not speeches.) One of the common features of spoken language (in contrast to written language), is the occurence of what are commonly called filled pauses. In English, the two most common/frequent of these are uh and um (or er and um in British English). These are generally considered to be non-linguistic speech elements, i.e. sounds that we make in the course of speaking that are not really part of the language. However, I just read a really cool article that makes the argument that um and uh should actually be considered words, in particular interjections:

We will argue that uh and um are, indeed, English words. By words, we mean linguistic units that have conventional phonological shapes and meanings and are governed by the rules of syntax and prosody. We will also argue that uh and um must be planned for, formulated, and produced as parts of utterances just as any other word is.

They suggest that the meanings of uh and um lie in their usage, as with other interjections. Whereas nouns, verbs and adjectives will be defined by way of a paraphrase or with synonyms, interjections typically have a description of how or when it is used. Take a word like ouch. Its most common usage is an interjection, and dictionary.com gives its definition like this:

ouch 1 /aʊtʃ/
(used as an exclamation expressing sudden pain or dismay.)

Notice how the definition is in parentheses. Compare this to your typical noun or verb, like, say, ouch (Okay, this is a totally new word for me, too, and nearly as surprising to me as the alternate definition of mother….):

ouch 2 /aʊtʃ/
noun
1. a clasp, buckle, or brooch, esp. one worn for ornament.
2. the setting of a precious stone.
–verb (used with object)
3. to adorn with or as if with ouches.

So the authors of this article (Clark and Fox Tree, 2002), suggest that uh and um are words with meanings that can be defined in terms of their usage: to signal that the speaker is expecting a delay in speaking. Further, they go on to elaborate that uh is used when the speaker expects a shorter delay before resuming their speech than for those cases when um is used. They found evidence to support this in several spontaneous speech corpora. They also discuss various implicatures (in the Gricean sense) associated with using uh and um, including many which have been explored in the literature. For example, a speaker may use a filled pause (or filler) to implicate difficulties in speaking (um…it’s the…doohickey…uh…um), or a desire to hold the floor lest someone else tries to get in a word edgewise (um…hello, still speaking here).

Anyhow, I found their arguments to be quite compelling. And considering um as a word squares quite nicely with my own recent awareness of written uses of um. I’ve found myself using um occasionally in emails, or in blogging, or blog comments. I use it to signal discomfort, or perhaps even embarrassment. For example, considering the following totally hypothetical comment exchange in response to an entry I’ve written about a childhood memory or finding a duck in the dishwasher:

comment from “Bob12497”:
Great post, and great layout! I agree with everything you say. I explore similar topics on my website.

comment from me:
Hi, Bob12497-
Um…thanks.

Or consider the following hypothetical email:

Hi, Bob-
It was great seeing you at the meeting this morning. As you could probably tell, I was very enthusiastic about our upcoming goals and my commitment to participation in these new projects. Um…could you remind me what the new projects are about?

Anyhow…um…I should probably get to some cleaning. The squirrels have started complaining about the clutter.

References:
Clark, H. H., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, volume 84, 73-111.

Snodgrass, G. & McSnorfle, Q.R.S. (2007). “Managing your duck in the dishwasher.” Unusual Duck Sightings Weekly, volume 23, pp. 23-99.