Since unidentified aerial phenomena (=UFOs) have been in the news recently, so has the "Fermi Paradox". And the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox has an interesting linguistic resonance, aside from all the speculation about what communication with aliens might be like. Here's Wikipedia on the original Los Alamos conversation: In the summer of 1950 […]
Some things that "everybody knows" are refuted repeatedly by the experience of everyday life. A notably example is the function of "filled pauses", whose American English versions are conventionally written "um" and "uh". Dictionaries all say that these are are expressions of hesitation, doubt, uncertainty; ways to fill time or hold the floor. The OED […]
The sixth (of 10) scheduled Democratic presidential debate took place on 12/19/2019. There's video on YouTube here, and a WaPo transcript here. As a start on various forms of analysis, I thought I'd take a look at some simple phonetic characteristics of the candidates' answers to the first question, which was about the current impeachment […]
Following up on recent posts suggesting that speech-to-text is not yet a solved problem ("Shelties On Alki Story Forest", "The right boot of the warner of the baron", "AI is brittle"), here's a YouTube link to a lecture given in July of 2018 by Michael Picheny, "Speech Recognition: What's Left?" The whole thing is worth […]
In the past few days, I've encountered some nice examples of the communicative interpretation of what I've suggested we ought to call "interpolations" rather than "disfluencies".
During the 2015 presidential campaign, Geoff Pullum wrote about "Trump's aphasia", and I responded ("Trump's eloquence") that [I]n my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form. This apparent incoherence has […]
In Iancu v. Brunetti, the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided, on free speech grounds, that Erik Brunetti should have the right to trademark his clothing line FUCT. Robert Barnes' Washington Post story ("Supreme Court sides with ‘subversive’ clothing designer in First Amendment case", 6/24/2019) notes that "justices on both sides of the court’s ideological divide […]
… as a technical term, that is. Disfluency is no better, although the prefix is less judgmental. There are two problems: These terms pathologize normal behavior, creating confusion between pathological symptoms and common phenomena in normal speech, which may be different not only in their causes and their frequency but also in behavioral detail; Applied […]
Over the years, we've discussed the fact that "filled pauses" (um and uh in American English) sometimes have communicative force beyond their role in filling compositional silences — see e.g. "And uh — then what?", 1/5/2004, and "Uh", 10/12/2016. There's a nice example in a recent headline at TPM: "Um, Tapes?", 1/21/2019. In the article […]
Disfluency has been in the news recently, for two reasons: the deployment of filled pauses in an automated conversation by Google Duplex, and a cross-linguistic study of "slowing down" in speech production before nouns vs. verbs. Lance Ulanoff, "Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test?", Medium 5/8/2018: I think it was the first “Um.” […]
Tara Golshan, "Republicans are following the same strategy on taxes that doomed Obamacare repeal", Vox 11/1/2017: “I think it would be intellectually dishonest to suggest that if we had had a bunch of wins on a whole bunch of items at this point, we perhaps would have been a little bit more deliberate in our […]
In a number of posts about Donald Trump's rhetorical style, I've noted how seldom he uses filled pauses such as UM and UH in spontaneous speech, compared to other public figures. For example, in "The narrow end of the funnel" (8/18/2016), I noted that filled pauses were 8.2% of Steve Bannon's words (in a sample […]
Sharon Begley, "Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?", STAT 5/23/2017: STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable. Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts […]