Testing the limits of the sociolinguistic monitor: The evaluation of pauses and pragmatic markers

Speech pauses and some functions of pragmatic markers such as you know and like are often the result of psychological processes as these items may highlight ongoing speech planning issues. At the same time, many of these are socially enregistered: they have acquired indexical meanings and are associated with particular personal characteristics or social types. It has been suggested that the variable output of the system of speech planning and monitoring is organised like any other variation, and that it may even undergo change (Fruehwald 2016: 47). This proposed similarity in the “quantitative systematicity” (47) between the speech planning system and other modules such as phonology and syntax may be due to these domains interacting with a separate domain of linguistic knowledge, such as a sociolinguistic monitor (Labov et al 2011).

This project aims to explore this proposal of structural similarity between the variation of classic sociolinguistic variables such as (ing) and (t) with those resulting from speech planning and monitoring. This project focuses on language perception. If these sets of systems are so similar in their variation and if they are the result of a general monitor, we would expect their variable output to be evaluated in similar terms. If they are not, i.e. if our experimental setup does not show evaluative sensitivity to planning features, one would have to conclude that the sociolinguistic monitor is sociolinguistically-specific and does not monitor conversational features due to speech planning.

To investigate these issues, this study will conduct a series of perceptual experiments with several different guises that listeners hear and evaluate, for example: speech without noticeable pauses and pragmatic markers, and the same speech with filled and unfilled pauses or pragmatic markers inserted. We will also explore to what extent the frequency of filled and unfilled pauses as well as pragmatic markers influence how speakers are evaluated. Data will be collected in England. We will focus on structures that vary in the degree with which they are associated with speech planning ranging from filled and unfilled pauses to certain functions of pragmatic markers that can appear in the same syntactic slot.