Of course a lot of work has been done by CA! What is your field of research, what kind of transcripts do you have? Institutional conversation? Interview talk? medical communication? Psychotherapy?

Best

Michael

In Conversation Analysis (CA), certain conversation 'fillers' are known as repair initiators. This is because it is recognized that these elements do not only act to gain time or signal cognition troubles, but from an interactional point of view, act to alert recipient to possible upcoming repair. The fact is, in actual CA work, the terms 'fillers' is seldom used, as it seems to suggest the redundancy of these items when they do rather important interactional work.

I can agree with this view.

Michael

A good speaker continuously makes use of (a) time-saving devices (e.g. pause fillers), (b) facilitation devices (e.g. ellipses, formulaic language or prefabricated patterns), (c) compensation devices (e.g. repetition, reformulation, rephrasing)

In fact, the third one is so important that these devices are, more often than not, reffered to as compensatory devices.

I had a list of the 100 most common spoken words in English made for Spanish speakers. Unlike most lists, it included the "fillers" - um, uh, er - on the list. They ranked very highly, I believe um and uh were in the top 20. But now I cannot find it.

Aside from the other purposes mention, these sounds are used as attention-orienting devices, in the US particularly um. As in "Um, let's get started. Strawberries were domesticated by monks in medieval Europe..."

This is one of those places where you will find people with strong views on language having strong views on using um instead of something else. Imagine John Cleese in a suit shouting "Attention!"

Schegloff, E. A. (2010). Some Other “Uh(m)”s. Discourse Processes, 47(2), 130-174.

They are rarely just "fillers" this is an intuitive interpretation. These kinds of discourse markers have pragmatic uses.