This thesis studies disfluency in spontaneous Swedish speech, i.e., the occurrence of
hesitation phenomena like eh, öh, truncated words, repetitions and repairs, mispronunciations,
truncated words and so on. The thesis is divided into three parts:
PART I provides the background, both concerning scientific, personal and industrial–
academic aspects in the Tuning in quotes, and the Preamble and Introduction (chapter 1).
PART II consists of one chapter only, chapter 2, which dives into the etiology of disfluency.
Consequently it describes previous research on disfluencies, also including areas that are not
the main focus of the present tome, like stuttering, psychotherapy, philosophy, neurology,
discourse perspectives, speech production, application-driven perspectives, cognitive aspects,
and so on. A discussion on terminology and definitions is also provided. The goal of this
chapter is to provide as broad a picture as possible of the phenomenon of disfluency, and how
all those different and varying perspectives are related to each other.
PART III describes the linguistic data studied and analyzed in this thesis, with the following
structure: Chapter 3 describes how the speech data were collected, and for what reason. Sum
totals of the data and the post-processing method are also described. Chapter 4 describes how
the data were transcribed, annotated and analyzed. The labeling method is described in detail,
as is the method employed to do frequency counts. Chapter 5 presents the analysis and
results for all different categories of disfluencies. Besides general frequency and distribution
of the different types of disfluencies, both inter- and intra-corpus results are presented, as are
co-occurrences of different types of disfluencies. Also, inter- and intra-speaker differences are
discussed. Chapter 6 discusses the results, mainly in light of previous research. Reasons for
the observed frequencies and distribution are proposed, as are their relation to language
typology, as well as syntactic, morphological and phonetic reasons for the observed
phenomena. Future work is also envisaged, both work that is possible on the present data set,
work that is possible on the present data set given extended labeling and work that I think
should be carried out, but where the present data set fails, in one way or another, to meet the
requirements of such studies.
Appendices 1–4 list the sum total of all data analyzed in this thesis (apart