Disfluencies as Intra-Utterance Dialogue Moves

Although disfluent speech is pervasive in spoken conversation, disfluencies have received little attention within formal theories of grammar. The majority of work on disfluent language has come from psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension and from structural approaches designed to improve performance in speech applications. In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of this phenomenon in the scope of formal grammar, and present a detailed formal account which: (a) unifies disfluencies (self-repair) with Clarification Requests, without conflating them, (b) offers a precise explication of the roles of all key components of a disfluency, including editing phrases and filled pauses, and (c) accounts for the possibility of self addressed questions in a disfluency.