Lexical and syntactic contexts of hesitation phenomena in formal deputy-citizen interviews conducted at Mexico City congress

Abstract

This article, which is an outcome of an ethnographic research, aims to offer an insight into lexical and syntactic contexts of some hesitation phenomena (short fillers, repetitions, long fillers, word lengthening, unfinished words and unfinished phrases), identified in a corpus sample that consists of structured interviews conducted by a group of deputies of Mexico City Local Congress with citizens who applied for the ombudsperson’s position at the city’s Human Rights Office (Comisión de Derechos Humanos de la Ciudad de México). Drawing upon a lexical and syntactic description, some remarks on the hesitation phenomena’s linguistic and communicative values are presented. I propose an interpretation of hesitation occurrence patterns that appear in the respondent’s answers. This interpretation is based on the discursive planning level, the interaction between hesitation markers and word classes, and the concept of repertoire as it has been used in the theory of translanguaging. Towards the end of the manuscript I argue that the studied phenomena and their distribution are directly related to open class words, and the cognitive effort of producing grammatical, accurate and socially appropriate messages.