Discourse Particles

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Danny from Carlsbad, California.

So I have a quick question.

I was wondering where we get our pause or thinking words from, such as or.

My teacher, when I was taking a Japanese class, mentioned that in English we use.

When we need to pause or think, however, in Japanese when they speak.

They use eto instead.

And she said in order to think properly in Japanese, you had to use their thinking word.

I was wondering where that comes from and why is it so universal for a language.

The deal is that we need them to fill in those gaps where we still want to keep our turn in a conversation,

But we don’t have anything to say quite yet.

For example, you have an incomplete thought.

But the thing is, these discourse particles, they’re also called filler words.

These discourse particles are transmitted exactly like other language.

We learn them from each other.

That’s it.

We just learn them from our parents and our peers and from the media, and we pick them up and we borrow them.

That’s why you do get trends and fads of certain kind of fillers being a little more prominent than others.

And different filler words in different languages, as you said.

Eto and ano in Japanese.

And in Spanish, it’s este.

For the longest time, you know, that means this.

Este means this in Spanish.

And for the long time, I thought somebody was saying this.

And then I finally realized they were hanging on to their place in the conversation.

And in French, I learned that it’s a bah, bah, bah.

They have a bunch in French, but that’s the one that I learned, bah.

So everything is just passed down basically from generation to generation of parents,

And then we have trends that come out of that.

Yeah, and they’re transmitted laterally as well.

It’s not necessarily through the years so much it could even be just from your contemporaries.

These filler words tend to be similar to each other in languages that are similar to each other.

So in languages that kind of have a Latin base or a romance language base,

They tend to be similar, or Germanic, they tend to be similar.

So from here in America, at least on the Californian coast,

It’s pretty much our, is it similar to us in Britain or on the East Coast,

Or would it differentiate between subcultures like that?

I can’t say for certain, but I do know, for example,

One term that has fallen out of usage,

Which I believe still is a little more used in the UK, is.

In the US, we don’t tend to say anymore if we ever did.

And in the UK, they’re more likely to say it.

That’s interesting.

You see it in print, but you don’t see.

Yeah, and this kind of stuff is really hard to study because you have to record a lot of speakers who don’t know they’re being recorded,

Then get their permission to use the recording, then transcribe every single thing that’s said by part of speech,

Then study that with these complex programs, and then come up with an answer.

And so you’re talking lots of money and lots of years and lots of grad students.

Grad students are cheap, but the rest of it’s hard to come by.

Do we have a record of any previous filler words, or what was the other term that you had used?

Discourse particles.

Discourse particles in previous generations or previous years have these words, at least for our dialect, been pretty consistent.

I don’t have an answer.

That’s a great question.

That’s not a great question.

You know what, Danny?

You’re just knocking them out of the park today.

If I find out, I’ll let you know, and I’ll post it to the website, all right?

Thank you very much.

It’s my pleasure.

Well, thank you guys for answering my questions, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Take care now.

Thanks, Danny. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And I should say that one of the really interesting things, and we’ve talked about him before, Michael Arard.

Yes.

He’s written at length on these kinds of words.

And he makes a point, and I think we should repeat it here, of saying you are probably peeved out when you hear people use these a lot.

But that is a modern phenomenon that we did not, as English speakers, start to be annoyed by filler words until the era of recordings.

Until the phonograph and the radio and the telephone.

How interesting.

When we begin to have our own speech played back to us.

Well, it sounds weird if you don’t have them, really.

And it turns out that if you don’t have discourse particles, if you don’t have these moments of pausing, you are harder to understand and less believable.

Less believable.

Less believable.

People are more likely to believe you if you have natural sounding pauses with or without discourse particles.

The particles are almost always part of it.

If you just talk straight through at a rapid pace with no space in between, I don’t know anybody who does that.

It might be me.

People don’t believe you as much.

I believe you.

I mean, there’s entire books written on these.

Oh, my gosh, yeah.

I think we could have talked to Danny all day.

But we’ll have to link to this in Wikipedia, which is kind of a grab bag of true and false.

But they have a really good entry on these filler words in a variety of languages.

Very good.

And Michael Arard wrote a whole book about it, right?

And we’ll link to that as well.

Okay.

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