Speech Management—on the Non-written Life of Speech

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of speech management (SM), which refers to processes whereby a speaker manages his or her linguistic contributions to a communicative interaction, and which involves phenomena which have previously been studied under such rubrics as “planning”, “editing”, “(self-)repair”, etc. It is argued that SM phenomena exhibit considerable systematicity and regularity and must be considered part of the linguistic system. Furthermore, it is argued that SM phenomena must be related not only to such intraindividual factors as planning and memory, but also to interactional factors such as turntaking and feedback, and to informational content. Structural and functional taxonomies are presented together with a formal description of complex types of SM. The structural types are exemplified with data from a corpus of SM phenomena.