A study to find out if the Finnish word "tota" belongs to a certain category in language

What is it about?

The authors conducted two naturalistic spoken language corpus studies that investigated the nature of Finnish filled pauses, discourse particles, and the planning particle "tota", the latter of which has hesitation and pragmatic functions. The authors found that the usage of "tota" was different from filled pauses and in their network analysis clustered together with grammatical politeness items (suffixes). This supports previous studies that suggest that filled pauses can, at least in some contexts, resemble and behave like grammatical items.

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Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Studying the membership of linguistic categories of words like "tota" is important because it helps us better understand how people use language in different contexts. By analyzing the usage and functions of these words, we can learn more about the structure and organization of language, as well as gain insights into how people convey meaning through language. Additionally, understanding the linguistic categories of words can help us improve language technology, such as natural language processing systems, which rely on accurate categorization of words to function effectively.