Suspensive and Disfluent Auto-Breaks in Spoken Language
Résumé
The numerous variations in verbal fluency are characteristic of oral statements in conversation and can involve morpho-syntactic disruptions. This study focuses on breaks in verbal flow, whether or not they give rise to a disfluent sequence. We noted all the auto-breaks along with their morpho-syntactic effects, in eight CID (Corpus of Interactional Data) dilogues. In many cases they came with by acoustic markers, verbal phenomena and morpho-syntactic consequences. This study made it possible to study the relationships between the interruptions themselves and their consequences. The syntagmatic process, when interrupted, was not always disrupted from a syntactic point of view: half of these ruptures are merely suspensive, the others are disfluent. All the types of insertion (Interregnum) are present in one or other of the cases of interruption although in varying degrees. The phenomenon of resuming a statement (rather than abandoning it) after a disfluent auto-break seemed to be a dominant characteristic of oral statements. The Interregnum which follows it is not same either. The percentage of disfluencies (length of auto-break ratings and disfluency phenomena) compared to the length of informative content in the oral utterances varies from one speaker to the next. This ratio is relevant since the length of time spent on non-informative utterance represents at least a third of the total speaking time.