ABSTRACT
As an introduction, this paper argues that attention to disfluent speech can not only change our view of nonfluent speech itself, but also alter the fundamental ideas we hold about speech and communication. Just as the black light used by the investigator of a case brings up wiped bloodstains to make them easier to find, disfluency shows us the fallacy of presuppositions that mislead linguistic researchers in their descriptions and spin their arguments. In the following, we first argue that disfluency is an intrinsic component of spoken language (Section 1), then introduce various basic patterns of disfluency found in normal native speakers of Japanese (Section 2), and then show the utility of disfluency (Sections 3–6). Finally, a summary of each paper is given (Section 7).
