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…’.
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