Naturally ‘disfluent'

The repeated Japanese adverb chotto ‘a little’ in everyday conversation is frequently less than fully produced, thus disfluent, as in cho%, cho, and chi.² Similar to what many studies have suggested regarding the single chotto, the disfluent repeated chotto mitigates 1) the semantics of what it modifies and 2) the impoliteness of what speakers do with the utterance in the context (e.g., temporally going out of the ongoing interaction). We, however, find neither the fluent version of the repeated chotto nor the fluent single chotto would be appropriate in the same context. In addition, sukoshi ‘a little’ and takusan and ippai, both ‘a lot’, a synonym and two antonyms of chotto, are rarely repeated in the same corpus. These findings suggest the disfluent repeated chotto is a construction that challenges the traditional view of grammar in which the single fluent chotto is assumed as the base form and its repeated and/or disfluent version as a derivative or even a degenerate variant. Our findings thus highlight the naturally disfluent nature of the linguistic structure, novel to analysts yet belonging to speakers.