| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 13-22 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 August 2021 |
| Received: 13 August 2020 / Received in Revised Form: 30 May 2021 / Accepted: 27 July 2021 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2021.2.1.13
|
Fillers in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE)
|
| Andy Seto (The Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education) |
| Copyright 2021 APJCRThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses with a specially designed computer software SpeechActConc to examine speech acts in business communication. The naturally occurring data from the audio recordings and the prosodic transcriptions of the business sub-corpora of the HKCSE (prosodic) are manually annotated with a speech act taxonomy for finding out the frequency of fillers, the co-occurring patterns of fillers with other speech acts, and the linguistic realisations of fillers. The discoursal function of fillers to sustain the discourse or to hold the floor has diverse linguistic realisations, ranging from a sound (e.g. ‘uhuh’) and a word (e.g. ‘well’) to sounds (e.g. ‘um er’) and words, namely phrase (‘sort of’) and clause (e.g. ‘you know’). Some are even combinations of sound(s) and word(s) (e.g. ‘and um’, ‘yes er um’, ‘sort of erm’). Among the top five frequent linguistic realisations of fillers, ‘er’ and ‘um’ are the most common ones found in all the six genres with relatively higher percentages of occurrence. The remaining more frequent realisations consist of clause (‘you know’), word (‘yeah’) and sound (‘erm’). These common forms are syntactically simpler than the less frequent realisations found in the genres. The co-occurring patterns of fillers and other speech acts are diverse. The more common co-occurring speech acts with fillers include informing and answering. The findings show that fillers are not only frequently used by speakers in spontaneous conversation but also mostly represented in sounds or non-linguistic realisations. |
Keywords |
| Corpus Linguistics, Fillers, Linguistic Realisation, Speech Act Annotation, Spoken Business Discourse |
References |
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The Author |
| Andy Seto is a Part-time Lecturer at the Language Centre of the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Haking Wong). He studied and conducted research in the field of speech acts and corpus linguistics at Department of English, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is the author of Speech Acts Annotation for Business Meetings (2013) and the co-author of ‘Thanks a Bunch’: Cross-cultural Comparison of the Speech Act of Thanking (2015). His research interests include Business Spoken Discourse, Corpus Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Pragmatics, Speech Acts. |
The Author’s Address |
| First and Corresponding Author Andy Seto Lecturer Language Centre The Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Haking Wong) 702 Lai Chi Kok Road, Cheung Sha Wan, Kowloon, CHINA. E-mail: andyswh18@vtc.edu.hk  DOI QR Code |
