Proceedings of DiSS 2021, 25–26 August 2021, Paris 8 University, France 105 Dynamic changes of pausing in triadic conversations Dorottya Gyarmathy, Valéria Krepsz, Anna Huszár and Viktória Horváth Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary Abstract Pausing in conversation has several roles from speech planning to managing turn-takings (TTs). However, less is known about the dynamic changes of pauses over time or with regard to the turn-taking system. The frequency and the duration of silent and filled pauses (SPs and FPs) as well as shared silences was analyzed in 20 triadic Hungarian conversations using dynamic frames (altogether more than 7700 items). Data showed that the frequency of silent and FPs decreased over time across conversations. As opposite, shared silences were found to be the most frequent in the last sections of conversations. However, the duration of the pauses did not change over time across conversation—it may be influenced by other factors. We found that the SPs containing audible breathing were longer than other SPs. The SPs were less frequent before turn-takings than in other positions. However, their duration was not affected by the turn- taking system. Introduction Pauses have many kinds of roles in communication (e.g. respiration, cognitive load, production problems), both in speech production and perception next to boundary marking. So not every pause necessarily behaves as TRP (transition relevance place, which is defined as timing when the current speaker’s turn can be completed and other participants are able to take the turn, cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), several factors can affect its appearance, frequency and duration as well. Local and Kelly (1986) investigated two different kinds of pauses: 1. ‘trail-off silences’ (a possible point for switching the role of the speaker) and 2. ‘holding silences’ (the speaker keeps the floor, it serves as an inhalation point or as a rhetorical tool). In case of trail-off pauses they found open glottis, out-breath, vowel centralization, and diminished loudness and tempo, preceded the pause. In the case of holding silence, they found closed glottis and no final lengthening preceding the pause. Levelt (1989) also differentiated types of silences according to their position and function. The speakers’ tempo increased in the vicinity of syntactic boundaries to keep the floor and the rights of speaking, however they slow down and take a pause in the next phrase (Schegloff, 1996, Eggins & Slade, 1997). The analysis of breathing in dyadic conversations corroborated that the speakers coordinate breathing to turn-takings (TTs). Inhalations inside a turn were shorter than when starting a new turn, suggesting that participants also adapt their breathing to hold turns (Rochet-Capellan & Fuchs, 2014). Inbreaths were analyzed in question-answer sequences in Dutch conversations, and they were found to be more frequent preceding long answers than short answers (Torreira, Bögels, & Levinson, 2015). Filled pauses (FPs) also have several functions in the organization of the TT system as well. FPs may have pragmatic functions as indicators of the Feeling-of-Another's-Knowing in a dialogue (Brennan & Williams, 1995), or as turn-holders (Stenström, 1994). Therefore, some works described FPs as an interactional phenomenon (Levinson, 1983, Clark, 1994). FPs mark for the listeners that the next utterance will be more complex and the speaker needs more time for speech planning. Swerts (1998) found that FPs after stronger breaks tend to occur phrase-initially, whereas the majority of the FPs after weak boundaries are in phrase-internal position. The type and the position of FPs showed connection: ‘um’ was found to be more frequent at turn-initial position than ‘uh’, while ‘uh’ occurred rather at turn-medial position. Another study corroborated that FPs are often used to initiate the speaker’s turn. In addition, when a speaker is confronted with unsuccessful answers in the course of the dialog, hesitations may also stand for marking his/her embarrassment and wish to close the dialog (Vasilescu, Rosset, & Adda-Decker, 2010). Isolated FPs occurred more frequently within their host unit than between clauses in English and French as well (Crible, Degand, & Gilquin, 2017). The FPs were also analyzed with regard to TTs from the Columbia Games Corpus (Benus, 2009). 33% of all FPs were in turn-initial position; so, FPs are linked to TT because these peripheral positions suggest several floor-management functions. FPs in this pre-start function allows the speaker some time for planning and the listener for tuning in. The aim of the present study was to analyze the silent and filled pauses with regard to their position in the conversations. The main question was, how does pausing change across conversations? Which part of the conversation does contain the least pause or the shortest shared silences (ShS)? Our hypotheses are the following: https://doi.org/******/******