The issue of hesitations in spontaneous speech in the Russian and Chinese languages



This article discusses the main types of hesitations that often occur in spoken Chinese and Russian. The author defines spontaneous spoken language and analyses various scholars' views on this issue in the first part. Spontaneous oral communication is a major component of language activities for anyone. Next, we will analyze different types of hesitation phenomena, such as speech failures, hesitant pauses, self-corrections, vocabulary repetitions, and parasitic words. The practical part of the article analyzes different classification systems for hesitation. Hesitation is considered one of the main features of spontaneous speech in all forms of oral communication.

Keywords: spontaneous spoken language in the Russian and Chinese languages, hesitation pauses, communicative activity.

1. Definition of spontaneous spoken language

At present, one of the core areas of phonetic research at home and abroad is focused on spontaneous spoken language. The concept of spontaneous spoken language is diverse, and scholars give various definitions of it. For example, L. V. Bondarko [10, p.11] defines spontaneous speech as a form of verbal communication that can be combined with varying degrees of preparation when organizing speech and used in different communication and dialogue situations (such as dialogues, multi-party dialogues, meetings, monologues delivered by oneself, reports, lectures, and impromptu speeches without relying on written material, etc.).

L. V. Zlatoustova's understanding of spontaneous speech is similar, which characterizes it as an unprepared form of speech production, largely dependent on the speaker's proficiency in the normative language and the goals, attitudes, and motivations of the speaker [9, p.50].

Other approaches to spontaneous speech suggest that spontaneous speech is caused not by external influences, but by internal causes [3, p. 289]. The incentive for generating spontaneous speech is the motive, the general idea of the subject of the message, with the «speech skills» characteristic of this person.

Spontaneous oral speech has a dual character. It is characterized by unpreparedness, but at the same time speakers can use ready-made forms of language. The choice of forms occurs during communication and is determined by a number of factors: the nature of the speaker, their level of education, type of activity occupation, etc. [12, p. 67].

Verbal spontaneous communication is characterized by speech errors, carelessness, and incomplete utterances, paying insufficient attention to external form to external form, which is completely unacceptable in written communication (with the exception of personal correspondence). Spontaneous speech is usually accompanied by paralinguistic features such as gestures, facial expressions and non-verbal sounds [10, p. 4].

Spontaneous speech is characterized by hesitations, that is, interruptions of speech explained by the fact that the speaker for some reason cannot continue speaking [12, p. 68]. J. Ragsdale suggests that hesitations occur with increasing inner excitement in a person, as the number of pauses, stutters, repetitions and phrase substitutions increase However, we can observe the phenomenon of hesitations not only in spontaneous speech in the speech of an agitated person but also in calm speech. Additionally, the speaker uses a hesitant pause to give more meaning to his statement or to find an appropriate phrase or word [1, p. 186].

Factors such as the external environment, extraneous noise, and weather conditions also play an essential role in the organization of spontaneous speech.

The extralinguistic factors influencing spontaneous speech include the individual characteristics of the voice, the manner of communication, and the mental traits of the speaker. Linguistic phonetic characteristics are also closely related to the speaker's mental traits: tempo, rhythm, tonal and dynamic range, syntagmatic division, pausing, presence of hesitations, reservations. All these characteristics depend on the degree of complexity of syntactic constructions used by the speaker as well as the choice of vocabulary dictated by the topic of conversation and phonetic features of morphological forms used.

So, spontaneous speech is characterized on the one hand by unpreparedness, a fast pace, repetition of words, a lack of clear pronunciation of sounds, the use of facial expressions and gestures. On the other hand, it is characterized by the use of pre-existing language forms.

2. The phenomenon of hesitations and its role in spontaneous spoken language

F. Lounsbury (1954), F. Goldman-Eisler (1958), and H. McLay (1960) were the first to start conducting psychological and psycholinguistic research on hesitation phenomena. Generally, all subsequent research on this phenomenon was based on their findings and conclusions.

The phenomenon of hesitation is a typical feature of spoken language, in both casual and formal spoken language, as well as colloquial, and it vividly reflects the creative side of speech [10, p. 245].

A major characteristic of spontaneous speech is the indecision in speech, which manifests itself as interruptions between words. This can be understood as a speaker's temporary inability to continue expressing themselves for some internal reason [12, p. 176]. J. Ragsdale noted that as the level of emotional excitement increases in an individual, the phenomenon of hesitating becomes more and more evident, manifesting itself in an increase in the number of pauses, stammering, repetitions, and phrase replacements [1, p. 186].

In fact, the phenomenon of hesitation is not only seen in spontaneous speech by emotionally excited people, but also in verbal expression of a peaceful state of mind. Speakers sometimes deliberately introduce hesitations in order to give their words a deeper meaning or to search for an appropriate phrase or word to accurately convey their thoughts [1, p. 187].

Factors such as the external environment, external noise and weather conditions also play an important role. Therefore, when the function of distinguishing within spontaneous speech is combined with that of hesitating, the superimposition of oscillatory pauses and true grammatical ones is defined as a dual function of pausing [7, p. 101].

O. A. Alexandrova and V. V. Ivanitsky (2003) identified the factors (exogenous and endogenous) that cause hesitation pauses: psycholinguistic, linguistic, sociolinguistic and psychological, individual and physiological. Exogenous factors include those caused by communication situations or other external conditions that are not dependent on the speaker's personality. Endogenous causes are internal.

3. The hesitation phenomena and hesitation pause

Every year, there is an increasing number of studies exploring hesitation phenomena and various hesitations in speech, both in native and non-native languages. Researchers such as N. V. Bogdanova-Beglaryan (2007), I. S. Brodt (2007), M. E. Kupina (2020) and Chen Chen (2015) have all contributed to this field of research.

Let us define the difference between the phenomena of hesitation and the concept of a hesitation pause. Hesitations are broader concepts that include speech interruptions, lengthenings, and verbal hesitations pauses, such as metatext comments, repetitions of words and phrases, and sublinguistic elements in the sound chain [8, p.74].

There are two ways to understand hesitant pauses: narrow and broad. In a narrow sense, a hesitant pause specifically refers to the pause that occurs during the speech process of a speaker. At this point, they are in the process of selecting words, looking for appropriate vocabulary units to insert into a specific position within an established grammatical structure [10, p.147]

O. A. Alexandrova believes that not every difficulty in speech generates a pause for hesitation, i.e., speech remains smooth and informative. Hesitation is a mental difficulty that always has its place in speech. In other words, pauses of oscillation and hesitations represent different aspects (external and internal, respectively) of the process of speech production [4, p.10].

In a broad sense, various instantaneous structure adjustments, such as additions, corrections, backtracking, etc. are classified as hesitant pauses [2, p.158].

In this article, the broader concept of the term «hesitation phenomena» is adopted, and hesitations pauses are considered to be a variety of these phenomena.

4. Types of hesitations and pauses in spontaneous speech

Let us delve into the intricacies of categorizing instances of hesitation.

L. V. Bondarko, L. A. Verbitskaya, and others divide hesitations into filled (indeterminate sounds, parasitic words, repetitions) and unfilled (complete absence of an acoustic signal) [10, p. 149]. Unfilled pauses are expressed by as physical pauses (cessation of phonation, break in sound), not caused by syntax division of the text. Placeholders for hesitations can be non-linguistic (for example, /a/, /am/ in English) [2, p. 7] or linguistic (lexical and semantic elements, such as этот , такой , вот , значит , etc.) [4, p. 9–18].

According to O. A. Alexandrova and V. V. Ivanitsky (2003), filled hesitation pauses can be represented by different indicators.

Verbal:

1. phonetic and phonological: vocalizations — э-э , м-м , гм , пхм , эгм ; удлинения звуков — нра-авится , с-слушать [ibid];
2. lexico-semantic: самый , так , ну , какбы , вобщем etc. [ibid];
3. syntactic: meta–textual comments по — правде говоря , короче говоря , так сказать , как говорится etc. [ibid]; unfinished statements are statements with unsupported syntactic positions, the meaning of these statements, which is necessary for communication, cannot be extracted from the context, the situation or the background knowledge of speakers — Даже дети в детском садике... Вот, мы сегодня разбирали вопрос о рекламе ; unintentional repetitions of words and phrases — мне нравятся передачи <передачи> о животных ; ясмотрела телевизор <смотрела телевизор> и читала [ibid];
4. morphological: unintentional repetitions of a part of a word — яимею в виду <ду ду ду> , false start — загружают фильм{ка} через диск and restart — \лю\ любимые передачи [ibid].

Meta-text comments, such as lexico-semantic placeholders, are linguistic units with specific functions. However, when acting as «exponents of hesitation pauses» [4, p.8], they lose their meaning and become desemanticized, losing their function and becoming «empty» words that indicate only the speaker's difficulty or doubt [10, p.103].

2. Non-verbal:
   1. an unfilled pause of oscillation is a long break in sound [ibid];
   2. paralinguistic hesitations (coughs, sighs, laughs, throat clears, tongue clicks, kinesics) [ibid].

A. A. Belitskaya (2014) attributes the following phonetic phenomena to filled hesitations pauses:

1. vocalizations;
2. lengthening of sounds;
3. empty introductory words, expressions, pronouns, adverbs, which are often called parasitic words or empty words;
4. the speaker's inserted phrases are metatextual comments addressed to the addressee or themselves, ensuring continuous contact with the interlocutor;
5. unintended repetitions, including partial repetitions, full repetitions of a word, and even repetitions of an entire phrase;
6. non-verbal hesitation pauses — coughing, sighing, laughing, clicking with tongue;
7. self-interrupts, including restarts and false starts;
8. unfinished statements in which meaning necessary for communication can not be extracted either from context, situation, background knowledge of speakers.

Zhang Cuimei (2008), in her work «Research on the Pragmatic Function of Hesitation Pauses in Speech», notes that in Chinese phonetics, various hesitations and hesitant pauses are referred to as the same term, 迟疑现象 ‘oscillation phenomenon’, which includes pauses, stammering, repetitions, and so on.

Formally, a pause usually manifests itself in the form of an interruption in the speech flow, that is, silence.

Chinese spontaneous speech is characterized by the active use of various semantic particles. Hong Xiufeng, a Chinese researcher, writes that «pauses perform five functions: initiating a statement, thinking about corrections, thinking about a subsequent statement, clarifying and adding to the previous statement, and evaluating the correctness of the previous statement» [14, p.173].

In spontaneous Chinese speech, the words such as 那个’ (nà ge) ‘that, that’, 这个 (zhè ge) ‘this, this’, and就是 (jiù shì) ‘that is’, are considered to be asemantic particles. The word啊 (a) is also used as an exclamation mark. The words 嗯(en) and 噢 (o) are used as interjections to express agreement or surprise.

In the process of constructing an utterance internally and implementing it in Chinese speech, a hesitant pause may occur. These pauses happen when a speaker has limited time and they are a result of hesitation.

«Stuttering» or break-off is considered an integral characteristic of oral spontaneous speech. A break is understood as a kind of stuttering of a speaker, when for some reason he gets lost in the flow of speech, breaks off a word, and often repeats it afterward [6, p.179].

Zhang Cuimei (2008) considers repetition to be an unjustified repetition of what the speaker has said in the process of thinking about a statement.

Zhang Cuimei identifies the following types of hesitations pauses in Chinese:

1. A pause caused by a lack of information, which occurs when the speaker suddenly faces a problem that needs time to think.
2. An unexpected pause that appears during a dialogue when an unforeseen situation arises. The speaker adjusts his state and train of thought, and thus has more time to solve the problem.
3. Pauses used to save face for the other party, which is a common phenomenon in Chinese culture. Speakers are afraid of not being understood, so they demonstrate uncertainty in their speech through various pauses.

Speech fluctuations are also a pragmatic strategy consciously or unconsciously adopted by speakers to ensure smooth communication.

Conclusion

In summary, the phenomenon of hesitations, as a common linguistic phenomenon, manifests itself in various forms across different languages. From the perspective of phonetics, hesitations can be divided into two types: filled and unfilled. Filled hesitations are further divided into verbal and non-verbal categories. The linguistic category includes speech, vocabulary, syntax and morphology, while the non-linguistic category encompasses sound interruptions and sub-lingual behavior.

Studies have shown that the phenomenon of hesitance not only reflects a speaker's thought processes during language production, but is also closely related to social and cultural functions of language. In Chinese, the phenomena of hesitation have unique manifestations and pragmatic functions, such as pauses, stuttering, repetitions, and strategies for politeness and face-saving.

The study of the phenomenon of hesitation helps us to gain a deep understanding of the mechanisms of language generation, the thinking process, and the influence of social and cultural factors on language expression. Future research can further explore differences in hesitation across languages and pragmatic functions in different cultural contexts. All in all, this paper reveals through analysis of hesitation phenomena in different languages the importance of hesitations in language use and their differences across languages and cultures. The study of hesitation contributes to a better understanding of language production and the role of language in social interactions.

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