So class today made me wonder … why do people hesitate and pause. Being a budding linguist, especially interested in discourse analysis, I find this question very appealing. I haven’t yet had the chance to take Sociolinguistics but… from intro i think i remember having a discussion about pausing in regards to turn taking, creating suspense for a story, a speaker’s nervousness in what he’s about to say, and many other things… but what’s interesting is an article we read about how people interpret these pauses. There was research done and it turned out that if there is a pause, an ‘um’ or whatever, before a statement, some people tend to develop a disbelief in what the speaker is saying. Maybe that’s why some people have a disbelief in the movie, because there are those pauses and then it may lead them to believe that the people are saying things only for the camera.
On another note… this doesn’t really relate at all, maybe a little because we did sort of talk about sound today in class… But last night I decided to go listen to Claudia Emmerson talk about Emily Dickinson (which was absolutely amazing by the way). She posed a question about sound. She asked if sound and syllable were the same. After contemplating this for awhile, I just want to put my thoughts on this down somewhere. I am going to have to say no, but sometimes yes. A syllable is made up of a nucleus, typically a vowel, and then associated consonans. When these seperate phonemes are put in combination they make specific sounds and those in turn make the syllable. In my mind, a syllable is more general then a sound. I’m actually amazed right now that I have so much more to say about this, but considering that it’s not related to class, I’ll stop rambling.