The Phonetician 115. (2018.) THE FUNCTIONS OF SILENT PAUSES IN SPONTANEOUS HUNGARIAN SPEECH Dorottya Gyarmathy Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences gyarmathy.dorottya@nytud.mta.hu Abstract Speech is occasionally interrupted by pauses of various lengths that are an essential part of human speech production. It is currently a matter of debate what exactly can be considered to be a pause, what the diverse forms are in which pauses can occur in speech, what their acceptable minimum and maximum durations are, and what kinds of functions they can have 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 differ from each other in terms of their functions, (2) the various types of silent pauses exhibit different patterns of frequency and duration, and (3) the duration of silent pauses is partially determined by their syntactic positions. We differentiated silent pauses (S) occurring either in phrases or at phrase boundaries from pauses functioning as editing phases (E). The former type of pauses will be called ‘syntactical silent pauses’ while the latter will be referred to as ‘editing phase silent pauses’. We will subcategorize syntactical silent pauses as follows: (1) phrase boundary pauses, (2) within phrase pauses, (3) end of phrase pauses, and (4) utterance onset pauses. The subcategories of the editing phases depend on the type of disfluency surrounding the silent pause at hand. Our results confirmed all three hypotheses. The temporal data supported the claim that the function of the silent pauses directly affected their frequency of occurrence and their duration. Keywords: spontaneous speech, silent pauses, editing phrase, syntactical silent pauses, function of silent pauses 1 Introduction Pauses, in an everyday sense, can simply be seen as silent portions of speech. Within a linguistic perspective, however, we are faced with a problem that is far more complicated. It is not quite clear what in fact can be considered to be a pause, how many types of pauses occur in speech, what its minimal and maximal duration may be, and what functions it can serve. During the first half of the twentieth century, the study of speech pauses focused largely on their use in rhetoric, or public speeches, brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Repository of the Academy's Library