Concerning about the meaning of fillers in a certain utterances, according to Hatt (1998, par.2), fillers can be also defined as words used in conversation that has no apparent semantic content. Along with that, Rudolf Verderber and Kathleen Verderber (2009, p.206) also calls fillers as "verbal garbage" because they do not serve a meaningful purpose. Similarly, Stenstrm (1994, p.69) states his thought that actually fillers are lexically empty item with uncertain discourse functions, except to fill a conversational gap.
From a brief explanation above, the best linguistic definition of fillers used in this research is sounds, words, phrases, or even breaks that occur in the flow of a certain utterance and do not have any meanings in the utterance, so thus can be deleted from that utterance without changing the content.
Examples of fillers include "well", "you know", "basically", "I think", "sort of", "kind of", "like", "I mean", "if you see what I mean", "ee", "err", "ehm", "huh", "ah", "uh" and so on (Brown and Yule, 1983, p.129, Hatt, 1998, par.5, Rose, 1998, pp.7-8).
Types of Fillers
In the spoken interaction, according to Stenstrm (1994, p.1), fillers can be categorized into two types, that is silent pauses and filled pauses.
Silent Pauses
Levin, Silverman, and Ford (1967, as cited in Foss & Hakes, 1978, p.180) state that silent pauses are unfilled pauses which occur greater than 80 msec duration. In addition, Clark (1977, p.567) states that silent pause is a hesitation in speech not filled with any speech sounds. Along with that, according to Wu (2001, p.3), silent pauses are simply called as the unfilled pauses when they occur in the middle of phrases and words. Similarly, Matthei and Roeper (1983, p.164) state that silent pauses tend to occur within phrases of the sentence. This statement is supported by Stenstrm (1994, p.7) who says that silent pauses are pauses that appear in strategic places of the sentences. In addition, Brown and Yule (1983, p.129) also mention that silent pauses are pauses which usually precede the utterance and help the speaker to plan putting the words into the utterances. They are usually called extended pauses because it usually extends between 3.2 to 16 seconds and cause the speakers to provide sufficient information to the hearers. (Brown and Yule, 1983, p.163). Chaney and Martin (2004, as cited in Matthei & Roeper, 1983, p.164) add that silent pauses can also indicate agreement or disagreement and lack of interest to other people.
In terms of the length, the standard length of silent pauses varies according to the rhythm of the speakers when they are talking. Therefore, the pause length is relative. Silent pauses are marked by brief/short/unit (.), double/longer than unit (-
-), treble/longer than double unit (---) (Stenstrm, 1994, p.7). The following is the example of silent pauses occurred in an utterance.
A: ehm (.) and ee (---) we, well, I mean, you know, I mean I do try and do something about this (Stenstrm, 1994, p.47).
Filled Pauses
