So …
When I asked him the name of the person who had rung while I was out, my husband enunciated the sound aaaaaaaaaahhh at such length that I wondered whether he wanted his tonsils inspected. In reality he was trying to remember, and so used this non-lexical filler.
It can be very annoying when people repeatedly resort to space-fillers, always saying um, er, I mean, you know or like. Some of these are words of a sort and so can only loosely be described as non-lexical, but they may be used as if they were not words but prosodic markers (such as tone or stress). We unconsciously realise someone is finishing a sentence because the tone falls. That is why it is uncomfortable to hear Australians and the young finish statements with a rising tone, as if they were questions.
Anyway, we all use little markers to introduce responses to questions or the beginning of a new thought (or at least a new sentence). An example is well. What puzzles me at the moment is the increasing popularity of the introductory particle so.
We are familiar with so being to mark a challenge: ‘So, you want to marry my daughter.’ In that case it is stressed by being spoken more loudly. Historically, so (like well) has been used as an introductory particle — ‘So, let me see.’ Here too it is stressed, and often followed by a pause. So may also serve as a conjunction, and in childish speech so or then may be used repeatedly as conjunctions in a narrative. The reason that the word so sticks out at the very beginning of Samuel Foote’s famous nonsense-sentence is that it does not function as a conjunction: ‘So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie…’.
Yet on the radio (on Today, for example) respondents increasingly begin their replies with so, not stressed, but spoken as if it were connecting the sentence to some previous statement. There was, however, no previous statement: it is the very beginning of a burst of speech. This has a disconcerting effect, as it would have if the speaker began his speech with and. I do not know where this habit of speech has come from, but it is spreading.
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