Abstract
Traditional approaches to typology focus on the spoken or written word and what they can tell us about the structure of language cross-linguistically. Pauses, or the temporary ‘breaks’ in the flow of the language signal, receive comparatively less attention (Kirsner et al. 2002, 52). In this study, we look at the distribution of silent pauses within existing multi-language corpora to see whether their location and length correlate with any higher-level syntactic groupings in the given languages, and what this can tell us about motivations for pausing phenomena.
Type
Naomi Peck
PhD Student; Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin
PhD linguist who is interested in how units are formed, wherever they are found in language.