The ubiquity of word-internal pauses

Abstract This paper presents a cross-linguistic survey of 738 word-internal pauses in 44 languages from DoReCo, a multilingual corpus of spontaneous speech. Word-internal pauses are attested in a variety of constructions and may occur at any morphological juncture, but are particularly frequent in polysynthetic verb forms and around prefixes and proclitics. Around one fifth of all word-internal pauses in the sample occur within minimal morphological forms rather than at morphological junctures. Word-internal pauses are sometimes ambiguous with regard to the domains they delineate and do not necessarily align with phonological word boundaries. The ubiquity of word-internal pauses and the fact that they can disrupt minimal morphological forms suggest a high degree of flexibility in how natural speech is produced, and calls into question the status of pausability as a reliable criterion for wordhood.