You have your normal verbal pauses like ‘um’ and ‘uh,’ but some people have phrases that they insert that add nothing to the meaning. They’re just filler. Some common ones that I’ve heard are “ya know,” and the longer “ya know what I mean” and “ya know what I’m sayin’”.
Do those fall under the umbrella of ‘verbal fillers’ or is there a better term for them?
Given that they occur in every language, I’m inclined to think they are psychological indicators to mark and define the relationship between the parties in the conversation. For example, “Nome sain” ( “Do you know what I am saying?”) is said by the speaker who already thinks he has the upper hand, and uses the expression not as an empty filler, but to confirm and intensify what he believes to be his dominant position.
Just as “uptalk” (rising questioning intonation at the end of a statement) marks an uncertainty in a statement, as if the speaker is keeping the door open, if challenged, to say “I didn’t state that as a fact, but asked if it might be regarded as a fact”. An internal face-saving gesture.
Face-saving has social import in any culture, and linguistic markers have evolved to enable a person to modify the effect that his discourse will have on whether he can come out of the conversation with a saved face.
They can also be an indicator of muddled thinking or a difficulty in putting one’s thoughts into words. For example I have a coworker who, while she speaks very good English, it’s not her first language. A year ago we were on a project together where she was tasked with doing several phone interviews with external customers. I bit my cheeks bloody (ok, not really) to not say anything (didn’t want to step on her toes because her boss told her to take the lead on these) because in every call she’d phrase her questions like this:
“So we’d like to… kinda like… what do you… what is your experience kinda like with… how often kinda like, do you run into this problem kinda like?”
:smack:
Don’t know the generic term for them, but I had a boss who would “hold the floor” (brook no interruptions or responses) by just moaning when he was in pause mode, inserting the taking of breath when needed, so as not to allow any space for you to butt in. Annoying to the extreme. Good tactic if you want to own the conversation, if it could be called such a thing.
I’ve heard “ya know what I’m sayin’” with increased frequency of late. I just say ‘uh’ a lot.
I had a manager at one of my college-age jobs (a six-month stint at Radio Shack, specifically), who was definitely of the “always on” rah-rah-rah school of management technique. He would use his listener’s name as space filler. I think he thought it would (a) renew the listener’s attention as he prepared to say his next thing, while (b) making the listener feel important [Dale Carnegie 101: The sweetest sound to any man in any language is his own name], and © spackling over those uncomfortable-to-him lapses in the conversation. It ended up sounding something like this, assuming your name was Ben. (Mine is. Feel free to substitute your own.)
*“And Ben, we’re about to hit the holiday rush season, which means go-go-go all the time Ben, and Ben, that means we can’t take time to stock during retail hours so what you need to do Ben is maximize the time before opening, Ben, and after closing, Ben so that you can give the customers all your attention, Ben, while they’re in the store, and Ben, that means instead of just, Ben, facing and fronting the stock, you know Ben, actually bringing as much stock as will fit on the shelf and you know Ben…”
*
It may have accomplished ©, but it failed spectacularly at (a) and (b), and in fact made all of us hate the sound of our own names. It was so annoying that it was hard not to flinch physically as he talked at you.
I figured that this habit grew out of a combination of factors: him being a nervous twit who couldn’t stand silence; and some bullshit notions he learned in manager school. I simply wasn’t sure what the proportions of the two were. That was, until the day he and I had to jump in his car and pick some things up from another Radio Shack across town. For the first eight minutes or so of the drive, we sat in silence, the radio playing softly. I was perfectly comfortable. Then, out of nowhere, without any preamble or follow-up, he blurted out:
"and Ben," :smack:
It is punctuated exactly the way he said it: like it belonged in the middle of a sentence that was otherwise audible only in his own head. He said nothing else for the remaining five minutes of the drive. To this day, I don’t know if he kept silent afterwards because he was embarrassed, or (and which I think is more likely) he didn’t even realize he’d said anything out loud.
It was one of the weirder experiences of my life, in its small way.
It can be really annoying when it’s used constantly. We had one architectural tour guide in our neighborhood who followed every sentence with “stuff like that.” Which stuff are you leaving out?
I had one employee who started nearly every response to a question or statement with “To be honest. . .” Do you normally lie to me?
It’s pretty apparent he thought most folks lied most of the time and he was the only brutally frank person in the room.
Whether he thought rightly is another question.
To be honest, I doubt it… ya know what I mean?
I say that fairly often at work, now that I think about it. When I do, what I mean is probably closer to “to be blunt,” and immediately precedes telling someone a potentially unpleasant truth.
Yeah, I interpret “To be honest” as meaning that the speaker is going to dispense with polite obliqueness in the interest of time or out of respect for the listener’s intelligence and understanding.
That’s certainly how I used it in my office worker career. Another similar phrase is “Don’t tell the customer this, but …” One which we used with disturbing regularity.
That was the case in some instances, when he wanted to get something off his chest, but more often it was just a meaningless intro to whatever he was going to discuss. “To be honest, I like Snickers better than Hershey bars.” If I was to take that literally, I would have to assume that he had constructed some sort of chocolate-based unsustainable fiction, and was coming clean at long last.
Were you his boss while working for Hershey Foods Co.? 
“Uptalk.” Thanks so much for putting a name on that. Is it in wide use?
Uptalk seems to me to be an astonishingly strong generational marker, as strong as vocal fry or Valley Girl intonation–and it’s actually more depressing, since it reflects a cognitive note (of deficiency or struggle, actually) that the other ways of talking do not.
And it’s use to match others’ use then lumps you with others who you shouldn’t be lumped with in other contexts. My nephew, now eighteen, drives me crazy with it, primarily because the sentences he says–declarative ones, not interrogatives–are (usually) intelligent and perfect responses in any discussion, tentative or clearly focused, if not argumentative.
But I think I hear it from so many people older than him. So my “generational” marker might need to be extended. Or I’m just getting too damn old.
It’s not really their place to apologize for your prejudices.
I’m so tempted to reply in questions…you know? Sometimes you raise your tone at the end of a sentence to imply and show respect to your interlocutor, to show awareness that you’re not implying that he is not aware of the subject. and that you’re both on the same plain, amiright? That would be clear, what? (As a Brit might say.)
High rising terminals are just high rising terminals. Awareness, whether subconscious or not, of the stigma in using high rising terminals has led to a lot of women adopting artificially lower pitches when speaking and now they get criticized for vocal fry, or creaky voice. What’s wrong with letting people be?
A related linguistic feature is ‘Phatic Communion’ (the phrase I learnt at college), which is apparently now called Phatic Expression - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression.
But that’s the opposite in a way, as it’s ‘small talk’ to lubricate relationships, rather than verbal filler to dominate conversation.