Background of The Study

The Hesitations in William's Utterances in His Conversations with Anna in "Notting Hill" (Elizabeth, 2006)

In her thesis, Elizabeth investigated about how hesitations occur and influence a speaker's utterances when s/he communicates and interacts in a conversation by using turn-taking and exchange strategies. She took the data from the conversations between William and Anna in "Notting Hill" movie since she noticed there are a lot of hesitations in William's utterances. Elizabeth investigated how William encourages himself to keep talking and communicating in the conversation. The findings showed that the hesitations appeared as the consequences of William's conditions when he felt confused, shy, panic, and nervous when he met Anna. In turn-taking and exchange strategies, Elizabeth found that William tried to handle his difficulty, to motivate himself, and to carry out his role in order to keep talking with Anna. Thus, William could build good communication and relationship with Anna. Finally, Elizabeth concluded that hesitations may help the speaker to build a good conversation, especially through managing him/herself, ideas, and strategy to run the conversation.

There are one similarity and two differences between my study and Elizabeth's research. The similarity is both writers used the same theories from Rose (1998), Wu (2001), Matthei and Roeper (1983), Foss and Hakes (1978), and Brown and Yule (1983) since hesitations and fillers are connected each other. Hesitations are the big umbrella of fillers, while fillers have one function as a marker of hesitations in the spoken interaction. That is why the theories used are quite similar. However, my research is different from Elizabeth's in terms of the subject of the research. Elizabeth's subject was William in "Notting Hill" movie, while my subjects were the students of the English Department, Petra Christian University from two different semesters. The second difference is that Elizabeth focused more on the turn-taking and exchange strategies in the conversation, while I concentrated more on the types and the functions of fillers in spoken 

interaction, although I also explained about turn-taking as one of several functions of fillers.

From Elizabeth's research, I learnt that turn-taking and exchange strategies which contain hesitations are useful to keep the conversation run smoothly, especially in handling the difficulties to find the right word and to keep the conversation run. By noticing the finding of this research, therefore I was encouraged more to investigate further about fillers which are narrower than hesitations, with different respondents and data.