Disfluencies in debate genre: A Case of world university students debate championship

This paper focused on university debate genre. The data for the paper was derived from world university debate championship. It involved recording of the corpora which were transcribed into written form. The corpora were usually characterized by a huge number of sentences which were disfluent. The elements which made a sentence not fluent were commonly referred to as ‘disfluencies’. Repetition of words uttered previously, complete corrections or restarts of sentences were some of the common features of students’ debate genre. When a speaker deleted elements considered to be disfluent in a given speech situation, s/he was left with only the intended meaning representations which could be considered clean. While some disfluencies were intentional while others were habitual, yet, others were side effects of anxiety, inadequate vocabularies, inefficient discourse knowledge, etc. The research revealed world University students’ debate championships were characterized by three major types of disfluencies: pause/fillers, repeats, and self – corrections. Statistics indicated that long unlexicalized pause a:m has a highest and it was attributed to unfamiliarity with some debate topics, due to short notice issued to participants prior to commencement of the tournament, hence they lacked right lexicons to use