Disfluency from a Typological Perspective: With Special Reference to “Prolongation+Continuation”

Abstract

This paper sheds light on the inherent disfluency of spoken language from a grammatical point of view. Previous research has pointed out the possibility of relevance of morphological complexity to the plausibility of disfluency patterns. Apart from this, we suggest that the degree of agglutinativity of a language also affects disfluency. According to our Agglutinativity Hypothesis, a high degree of agglutinativity in a language tends to allow for a “prolongation+continuation” type of disfluency within a single morpheme. We show this based on observations of Chinese, French, Hungarian, Korean, Sinhalese, Tamil, Turkish, and Japanese.