The role and structure of pauses in Slovenian media speech

Sa？etak This article explores pauses in terms of the roles they play in speech and their structural composition. They are perceived as the indispensable acoustic and/or semantic break in the flow of speech and are considered an important marker and organizer of speech. The study, based on a corpus of selected Slovenian talk shows (i.e. authentic and relatively spontaneous media speech), showed that 1) on average cognitive or communicative pauses (not physiological ones) predominate among the speakers analyzed, 2) speakers most often interrupt their speech to look for the right formulation and to plan syntactic structures and the segmentation of the flow of speech, 3) on average, empty or silent pauses, which primarily but not exclusively perform the role of breathing, are the most common among the speakers analyzed, and 4) with all the speakers analyzed, drawn-out schwas (uh sounds) occur most often among filled and "silent-filled" pauses