Thursday, February 19, 1998 at 15:56:52

i think this a great topic.  i have taken several speech classes and besides moving around a lot, fp's are what the teacher tends to not want us to do.  people do it a lot and this topic needs more study.  i have  a question.  people say uh, um etc.-is saying 'like' and 'you know' that same thing?

- NH

I argue that there are times when they fulfill the same function as filled pauses, though not always.  For example, consider the following two utterances.

(1) "Have you seen that...you know, that worthless brother of mine?"
(2) "Recently I've been playing a lot of those computer games, you know, Nintendo, Sega, and those"

I would suggest that in (1) 'you know' is a lexicalized filled pause because it adds nothing to the message or the organization of the discourse.  (2) though, is less certain:  'you know' may be interpreted as a discourse-organizer marking the subsequent clause as an elaboration of the original statement.

So far, though, in Linguistics, few researchers have included lexicalized FPs in their studies.  I may be among the first to attempt to do so. However, the results of my current work are not conclusive...

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