Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking

doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00781-0

Cognition

Volume 62, Issue 2, 1 February 1997, Pages 151-167

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00781-0 Get rights and content

Abstract

In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy, with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy to signal an immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production. Fully 81% of the instances of thiy in the corpus were followed by a suspension of speech, whereas only 7% of a matched sample of thuhs were followed by such suspensions. The problems people dealt with after thiy were at many levels of production, including articulation, word retrieval, and choice of message, but most were in the following nominal. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Section snippets

Method

To compare thiy and thuh, we (a) identified every instance of thiy in a large corpus of spontaneous conversations, (b) created a matched sample of instances of thuh, and (c) checked for differences between the two samples.

As data we used the transcripts of 50 face-to-face conversations (numbered S.1.1 through S.3.6) from Svartvik and Quirk's (1980) corpus of English conversation, the so-called London–Lund Corpus (hereafter the LLC). These transcripts totaled about 170,000 words, or 850 pages in

Results

Speech was immediately suspended 81% of the time after thiy, but only 7% of the time after thuh, a ratio of 12 to 1 (χ²=505.51, p<.001). The rate of suspensions was roughly the same after thiy as after thi:y, 78% to 80% (χ²=.14, p>.5; NPs containing both thiy and thi:y were not included in this analysis). These data strongly support the hypothesis that thiy signals an immediate suspension of speech. But why did speakers suspend their speech after thiy? We will examine (a) pauses, fillers, and

Discussion

In spontaneous talk, speakers try to get their addressees to identify their utterances as efficiently as possible. The ideal way, ordinarily, is by speaking fluently, but speakers inevitably run into production problems that they and their addressees have to resolve. At one extreme, speakers can notice and correct a problem even before it becomes audible to their addressees. At the other extreme, speakers can fail to notice a problem, correcting it later only at the prompting of their

Acknowledgements

We thank C.C. Levelt, W.J.M. Levelt, P.J.A. Meijer, and E.E. Shriberg for suggestions on several issues in this research. The work was supported by NSF Grants SBR-9309612 and IRI-9314967.

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