The intra-word pause and disfluency in Dalabon

Abstract

Earlier impressionistic analyses of Dalabon indicate that the grammatical word is often realized as either an accentual or an intonational phrase, followed by a pause. Unusually, it can also be interrupted by a silent pause, with each section being potentially (although not necessarily) realized as separate intonational phrases. Our analyses of pause duration and pause placement within grammatical words support these earlier impressions, although this use of the silent pause appears to be restricted to certain affix boundaries, and other phonological constraints relating to the following surrounding linguistic material. These interruptions also share certain characteristics of “normal” disfl..