ABSTRACT
When I was immersed in the preceding studies of everyday speech disturbances, I was looking for them everywhere, including dialogues in fiction and drama that I encountered in daily life. My informal searches produced two surprises. First, some fictional dialogue includes fictional speech disturbances. Thus, I often saw “er … er” where “ah” or “uh” or “uhm” occurs in real speech. Sometimes “er … er” indicated stuttering. Yet I cannot recall ever observing “… er …” in the extensive corpus of spontaneous speech we have investigated (see chapter 9, p. 166). Second, I saw that masterful dialogue may rarely contain everyday speech disturbances. Thus, I noticed that Ernest Hemingway rarely used them.
