Full Description
The papers brought together in this volume illustrate how spoken corpora (be they native or learner corpora) can provide insights into various aspects of errors and disfluencies such as pauses and discourse markers. They show, among others, that such phenomena can be influenced by factors like gender, age or genre, and that they can correlate with, e.g., informativeness and syntactic complexity. Crucially, they also demonstrate that items which are often dismissed as mere disfluencies can fulfil important functions and thus play an essential role in the management of spoken discourse. The book should appeal to linguists who are interested in spoken language in general and in errors and disfluencies in speech in particular, as well as to specialists in second language acquisition and language testing who want to know more about the nature of fluency and accuracy. Originally published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16:2 (2011)
Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Errors and disfluencies in spoken corpora: Setting the scene (by Gilquin, Gaetanelle); 3. Uh and Um as sociolinguistic markers in British English (by Tottie, Gunnel); 4. Windows on the mind: Pauses in conversational narrative (by Ruhlemann, Christoph); 5. Well I'm not sure I think... The use of well by non-native speakers (by Aijmer, Karin); 6. Fluency versus accuracy in advanced spoken learner language: A multi-method approach (by Brand, Christiane); 7. Fluency, complexity and informativeness in native and non-native speech (by Osborne, John); 8. Name index; 9. Subject index
