« Confused about using disfluencies | Main | Professionals purposely using disfluencies. »

Future generations will think this is obvious

From chapter 11 in Erard he quotes Jean Fox Tree on page 251 in saying "in our lifetime we will accept that these (pause fillers) are meaningful. Forty or fifty years from now, if not sooner, you can talk about this stuff in high school and people are going to think it's obvious." My question regarding this statement is how is this going to happen? As we have talked about in class there is still a lot of negativity around pause fillers as well as a correlation between them and a lack of intelligence. Unless everyone starts reading books like Um... and learns how prevalent pause fillers really are, how are we going to teach future generations and bring them to a point where they are going to see using them as an obvious way or life. In the future, are the stereotype we seem to have established of using "um", "uh", etc no longer going to be associated with one having poor speech or not being very smart like Tree predicts?

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://webpub.allegheny.edu/cgi-bin/moveabletype/mt-tb.cgi/2598

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on February 18, 2008 12:53 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Confused about using disfluencies.

The next post in this blog is Professionals purposely using disfluencies..

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Powered by
Movable Type 3.35