One of my coauthors described his participation in a psychology experiment where he was supposed to navigate a maze of some kind. But, as with most psychology experiments, the question wasn't whether he would make it through the maze, but something else. Namely, the experimenter wanted to see how many times, as well as, presumably, when, and where, the research subject said "um" and "ah" when tracing through the maze. The only problem was that my coauthor was very slow and deliberate in his tracing, so he never said "um" or "ah" and had to be ruled out from the dataset as an "outlier."
It occurs to me that "um" and "ah" ("filler" words in linguistics terms) might be usable examples of phatics, a bit similar to the example of applause that we talked about recently. I suspect that - outliers like my colleague notwithstanding - some interesting psycholinguistics work has been done to describe the function these words serve.
It also occurs to me that such words are a little bit like "sonic diagrams." That is, they have the potential to turn a flow of grammatical text into something much more structured - operatic, even - which is then interpretable as a kind of schematic. Some evidence to support this view, I think, is in the data presented in P. B. Andersen's "A theory of computer semiotics: Semiotic approaches to construction and assessment of computer systems".
Andersen includes accounts of people trying to talk together about technical systems, in cases when they can't both see the system they are talking about to point at it. So, for example, a car mechanic looking at the engine from one perspective, while his teacher looks from another perspective. In these dialogues, if I remember correctly, there are lots of "ums" when they talk about "the thing" and "the other thing" that they are trying to sort out amongst themselves.
Perhaps the ums and ahs help people hook together two different "mazes", building a joint "map" of two different territories.
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