| 词组 | fillers |
| 释义 | fillers Filler is a term used for words, phrases, and sounds (often spelled er, uh, urn) that are used to fill gaps or pauses in discourse by speakers, as Burchfield 1981 diplomatically puts it, "who temporarily lose their fluency." A number of these—actually, like, you know, for instance—have been denigrated by usage writers, many of whom seem unaware of their function. One astute observer of the language describes the function of fillers this way: • For the speaker, they give time for formulating the coming material, and for both speaker and hearer, they signal that the speaker will continue; the hearer's turn to reply has not come —Archibald A. Hill, in Studies in English Linguistics, ed. Sidney Green-baum et al., 1979 Some fillers—well, oh—introduce an utterance, and others—actually, you know, isn't it?—are used as tags at the end of an utterance. Robert F. Ilson, in The English Language Today (1985), notes that British English has a wider variety of these than American English. It also appears that some of the British fillers are considered indicative of social class. Fillers have been studied to some extent by linguists, but there is undoubtedly a great deal that we do not know about their functions and the constraints under which they are used. Just remember, when you read this or that writer discoursing on the subject, that fillers are characteristic of speech, not of written prose. |
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