FILLER WORDS IN MEDIA SPEECH

Abstract

In most of the grammar books filler words have a marginal position. Nevertheless, they are an important source of information for many aspects of linguistic performance. The purpose of this paper was to investigate some of these aspects in more detail, i.e., the use of filler words depending on the speech style in the media, on gender, as well as to get a better insight into speech planning during speech production. The investigation includes the analysis of the frequency of filler words in spontaneous speech in Croatian in formal and entertaining TV shows. In addition, the analysis includes the position of filler words in the utterance, their lexical category, and their distribution according to sex. The analysed speech corpus consists of oneminute recordings of 40 speakers in live broadcasts of public television, which are equalized according to gender and type of show. The results show that some filler
words are used by all speakers, although their frequency varies significantly between speakers. Furthermore, filler words are much more often used in entertaining shows than in formal shows, which can be explained by the different communication strategies of the speakers in these two types of shows. In addition, filler words are significantly more frequent at the beginning of the utterance as compared to the middle and the end of the utterance, which supports the thesis that the beginning of the utterance is the place with the highest cognitive load in speech production. There is no difference in the total number of filler words between the sexes, but men use filler words at the end of the utterance more often than women. As far as parts of speech are concerned, filler words are most frequently verbs, followed by adverbs and pronouns. The most frequent filler words in the analysed corpus are Croatian expressions: ono (that), pa (well), ovaj (this), zapravo (actually) and dakle (so), and besides these collective filler words, speakers also use individual fillers, typical for individuals or smaller social groups.