Looking Back and Looking Further Forward

Abstract

I began this book by noting that pauses and speech rate are ubiquitous features of speech, that they are characteristics of every utterance of every speaker and of every language. From the perspective of linguistics in general and sociolinguistics more specifically, it can be tempting to take these features for granted – to view them as either nonlinguistic (i.e. not of interest) or as simple and unidimensional. I hope the discussions and many studies of this book have illustrated that neither of these views are accurate. Silent pauses and rates of speech are complex phenomena with subtle patterns that shed light on social differentiation across and within speech communities and on the cognitive processes implicated in speech production.