Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 June 16

= June 16 =

Pattern of speech where the person puts a full stop after their last. three. words.
I have been noticing more and more lately where DJs and other announcer types of people will put a period after the last three words of most of. their. sentences. I hear it occasionally from various people when they want to emphasize what. they're. saying. But DJs and other announcer folk, I think, use it to stall while they think of what they're going to. say. next. So... My question... Does this pattern of speech have. a. name? Thanks, † dismas †|(talk) 12:51, 16 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Those seem like two quite different cases. The first case may almost always use 2 pauses (between 3 things), but those 3 things aren't necessarily single words. For example "Best. Comic book. Ever." In the second case, there could be any number of pauses, and the words may be dragged out, too, to stall for time (with fillers like "uh" being another method). This reminds me of something funny I heard on talk radio, when the presenter didn't know what the next segment was: "Later, I'll sit down with the Senator, but first ................................................ here's the news." Meanwhile I'm thinking "Of course you're going to sit down with the Senator butt first, how else would you sit ?". :-) SinisterLefty (talk) 12:58, 16 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Don't know a name for it,, but LanguagLog has a column mostly about it from 2007. I found that by searching for "emphatic period". By the way, I concur with that this is completely unrelated to slowing down words in order to stall. The intonation is different. --ColinFine (talk) 16:12, 16 June 2019 (UTC)


 * They're not specific to this instance, but discourse marker and filler are the general concepts. Matt Deres (talk) 16:43, 16 June 2019 (UTC)