ИСТИНА

Spontaneous speech in Modern Irish is marked by the extensive use of pauses, both filled and unfilled ones. Although there are cases where pauses can be described as a hesitation phenomenon only, in a large set of examples their use is closely connected with the information status, new data being enhanced and highlighted by the pause (Trouvain 2003). Moreover, pauses not only distinguish important parts of an utterance from those performing background, or secondary, function in speech, but also slow down the overall speech tempo which can be used to attract the listener’s attention (Tomlin et al 1997:70). If we now turn to Modern Irish dialects, it is the placement of pauses in speech that appears to be of particular interest. Thus, in Connacht Irish the majority of pauses occur either on a phrase border, directly preceding the following utterance, or between the self-contained parts of the same utterance. Such pause distribution allows for the fact that it is the part of an utterance following the pause that acquires special prominence in the flow of speech. As for Munster Irish, the word stress there is not infrequently attracted to the final syllable of a multisyllabic word (Ó Sé 1989:172). It means in fact that more often than not the speaker would place a pause immediately after such words, and not before the next utterance, as in Connacht Irish. As a result, a totally different part of an utterance might be brought out in the flow of speech. In the present paper the two dialects will be contrasted in terms of pausing, the special attention being given to pause distribution within a sequence of utterances and the possible effect it may have on the listener. The main question here is whether the nature of pausing and speech tempo change it induces remains more or less the same for the dialects under analysis, or it may sometimes develop its own characteristics. Furthermore, a number of examples will be adduced to illustrate the functioning of pauses in Modern Irish.