PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

It is a widely known phenomenon that silence among people engaged in dialogue can be awkward. In linguistic terms, the awkward silence could be understood as a silence threshold; a period of time that has to pass silently in dialogue after which any speaker will give in to the urge to contribute anything. Sometimes there will be nothing to contribute, in which case it is assumed that speakers produce linguistic hesitations or produce non-committing, low-content material. Silences are among the most frequent hesitations, along with fillers (uh, uhm). The interplay of silences and fillers can thus be very revealing for linguistic approaches to the awkward silence. In this study, I propose that fillers ground hesitations in dialogue and increase acceptance for subsequent silences. To test this hypothesis, I analyze spontaneous speech data from four languages, with regard to co-occurences of fillers and silences. The hypothesis is that silences are longer when occurring after fillers. The hypothesis is correct for German and English, but cannot be accepted for French and Italian, which suggests that both the concept of the awkward silence as well as general properties of hesitations are subject to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences that demand further attention.