ABSTRACT
This chapter helps to study the co-occurrence of uh and um with silent pauses in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBC) and compare its findings with previous work in order to establish their status and functions. The chapter discusses the material and its comparability with that of Clark and Fox Tree and O'Connell and Kowal and present overall frequency data. It also discusses the occurrence of uh and um without pauses and the accountability problem with regard to uh and um. 14 text extracts have been examined from the first part of the corpus. The present study shows that a large proportion of instances of uhm were not accompanied by pauses at all in American English, and about one-half of the instances of uhm did not serve to introduce delays but ended them.
