A Psycholinguistic study on hesitation of Mc Cain’s speech in the debate with Barack Obama at The University of Mississippi

ABSTRACT

Allah swt creates human beings better than other creatures, but human beings always hesitate the power of Allah swt. Allah swt gives ability and frailty to them because He wants to show that there is nobody perfect except Him. One of the imperfections of human being referring their speech is categorized as speech production errors. The common type of speech production errors is disfluency. Disfluency in speech delivery is called hesitation.

Hesitation pause is conversational silence that occurs within a turn. Hesitation pause is one of the frequent features which are commonly produced. This research chooses the United States first presidential debate because this research finds some hesitations either consciously or unconsciously found in Mc Cain’s utterances in the debate with Barack Obama at the University of Mississippi, how those pauses occur in natural speech. In this debate every candidate tries to do everything as good as possible and they try to attack each other. Sometimes they need to hesitate some sentences to get the best words and to get sympathy from audience.

This research uses descriptive qualitative design. It is called descriptive because it describes about the hesitation of Mc Cain’s speech in the debate with Barack Obama at the University of Mississippi. Qualitative method was used to analyze the kinds of hesitation. The data were collected by observing Mc Cain’s speech when he delivered his speech in the debate.

The results of this research show that Mc Cain uses two kinds of hesitation namely unfilled pause and filled pause. It can be concluded that unfilled pause is mostly found in Mc Cain’s speech in the debate with Barack Obama at the University of Mississippi. The result also shows that the hesitation in unfilled pause mostly happens in the context when Mc Cain tries to give a clear explanation and clarification.