PRONOUNCING THE AS THEE TO SIGNAL PROBLEMS IN SPEAKING

In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy: to signal an immediate suspension of speech t o deal with a problem in production. Fully 81% of the instances of thi y in the corpus were followed by a suspension of speech, whereas only 7% of a matched sample of thuhs were followed by such suspensions. The problems people dealt with after thiy were at many levels of producti on, including articulation, word retrieval, and choice of message, but most were in the following nominal. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.