A speaker/writer uses a placeholder (PH) to fill in the syntactic slot of a target word when she has no immediate access to the word or prefers to avoid explicitly mentioning it for contextual reasons. In the present article, I point out a hitherto understudied usage of PHs: a speaker/writer who does not have in mind a specific target form may use a PH to refer to an arbitrary entity (e.g. person, object, action, event, proposition). I substantiate this claim by analysing a variety of original data on Japanese wh-derived PHs. Further evidence for this claim comes from a cross-linguistic survey of wh-derived PHs in Korean and demonstrative-derived PHs in Romanian and Bulgarian. I show that the arbitrary-referential function is observed in PHs in all these languages, regardless of their origins (i.e. wh word, demonstrative) and their categories (i.e. nominal, verbal).
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Corpora
The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ): The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
The Corpus of Historical Japanese: The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
The Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ): The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
The NINJAL Web Japanese Corpus (NWJC): The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
The Sejong Corpus: The National Institute of Korean Language
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Seraku, Tohru
2023. Creating placeholders on the fly: A metarepresentational approach. Journal of Pragmatics 210 ► pp. 109 ff.
Seraku, Tohru
2023. Grammars for placeholders: The dynamic turn. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8:1
2024. Placeholders in crosslinguistic perspective: abilities, preferences, and usage motives. Linguistics
Seraku, Tohru, Sooyun Park & Yile Yu
2022. Grammatically unstable placeholders and morpho-syntactic remedies: evidence from East Asian languages. Folia Linguistica 56:2 ► pp. 389 ff.
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