This title isreallygreat

March 10, 2024 7:30 PM

Is there a linguistic term for adding filler words, especially adverbs, spoken so quickly that they don't slow down the speaking of the main words in a sentence? For example, if someone would say "I don't want that" at a deliberate pace, they say "Iabsolutelydon'twant that" in the same amount of time. Also, is there research on why some people do this?
posted by michaelh to Science & Nature (4 answers total)

Here is an article about this. tl;dr: People don't agree on what it is or what to call it.
posted by limeonaire at 8:07 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

This seems like a version of isochrony that applies at the level of words within a phrase rather than the (usual) syllables within a word. To explain: Spanish is a syllable-timed language, where all syllables of a word, whether or not that syllable bears the word's stress, take the same amount of time to say. English is a stress-timed language, where there is a regular, constant amount of time between stressed syllables, so unstressed syllables are pronounced more quickly in order to jam them into the same amount of time. (This leads to the vowels in those syllables getting reduced to a neutral "schwa" sound.) What you're talking about is essentially stress timing, with "main words" as the "stressed" elements.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:20 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

I've always known it as tmesis.
posted by SPrintF at 8:57 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Given your examples it sounds like you're not talking about things like abso-fucking-lutely, where a word is inserted into another word, but instead about the tendency to stick extra not-strictly-necessary words into a sentence, right? If so, I'd say that's sometimes used for intensifying effect ("I absolutely don't want that" can be stronger than "I don't want that"), and sometimes conversely for a softening effect ("Do you want some cake?" comes across as softer and more friendly to me than "Do you want cake?"). And sometimes it can be a social signaling thing, where people in your social group tend to talk that way so you do, too.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, though, because I don't really recognize the timing aspect you talk about. If I heard "Iabsolutelydon'twant that" I'd just hear that as them speaking quickly, with the "absolutely" being partly elided (maybe? It's not clear in the example) or just not stressed because it's only there to convey tone rather than changing the semantic content of the sentence, and possibly because it's such a habitual usage for the speaker that they slide over it. (Why habit can lead to elision might be a more complicated question than I'm making it seem, though.)
posted by trig at 5:16 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]