Article published In:
PragmaticsVol. 32:3 (2022) ► pp.426–451
Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholders
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).
Keywords: target word,
wh word, demonstrative, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Bulgarian
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The issues: The referential types of placeholders
- 3.
Wh-derived placeholders in Japanese
- 3.1Descriptive preliminaries
- 3.2Placeholder nani
- 3.3Predicative variants of nani
- 3.4Archaic variants of nani
- 3.5Doubled variants of nani
- 3.6Summary
- 4.Evidence from Korean, Romanian, and Bulgarian
- 4.1Korean
- 4.2Romanian
- 4.3Bulgarian
- 4.4Summary
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References -
Corpora
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
References
Amiridze, Nino
2010 “Placeholder Verbs in Modern Georgian.” In Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders, ed. by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan. 67–94. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 
Amiridze, Nino, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan
Cheung, Lawrence
2015 “Uttering the Unutterable with Wh-Placeholders.” Journal of East Asian Linguistics 24 (3): 271–308.
Crystal, David
1995 “In Search of English: A Traveler’s Guide.” ELT Journal 49 (2): 107–121.
Dimock, Laura
2010 “Fillers and Placeholders in Nahavaq.” In Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders, ed. by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan. 119–137. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Enfield, Nick
2003 “The Definition of
WHAT-d’you-call-it: Semantics and Pragmatics of Recognitional Deixis.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (1): 101–117.
Fox, Barbara
2010 “Introduction.” In Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders, ed. by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan. 1–9. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ganenkov, Dmitry, Yury Lander, and Timur Maisak
2010 “From Interrogatives to Placeholders in Udi and Agul Spontaneous Narratives.” In Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders, ed. by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan. 95–118. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hayashi, Makoto
2003 Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese Conversation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hayashi, Makoto, and Kyung-Eun Yoon
2006 “A Cross-Linguistic Exploration of Demonstratives in Interaction: With Particular Reference to the Context of Word-Formulation Trouble.” Studies in Language 30 (3): 485–540.
Hengeveld, Kees, and Evelien Keizer
2011 “Non-Straightforward Communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (7): 1962–1976.
Huang, Huei-ju, and Michael Tanangkingsing
2005 “Repair in Verb-Initial Languages.” Language and Linguistics 6 (4): 575–597.
Jucker, Andreas, Sara Smith, and Tanja Lüdge
2003 “Interactive Aspects of Vagueness in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (12): 1737–1369.
Jung, Sang-Cheol
2017 “Hangobun-no Joohookoozoo-nitsuite [On the information structure of rhetorical questions].” Journal of the Society of Japanese Language and Literature, Japanology 761: 121–142.
Kaye, Alan
1990 “Whatchamacallem: A Consideration of Thingummies, Doohickeys and Other Vague Words.” English Today 6 (1): 70–73.
Keevallik, Leelo
2010 “The Interactional Profile of a Placeholder: The Estonian Demonstrative See
.” In Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders, ed. by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan. 139–172. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Kim, Kyu-Hyun, and Kyung-Hee Suh
2002 “Demonstratives as Prospective Indexicals: Ku and Ce in Korean Conversation.” In Japanese/Korean Linguistics 101, ed. by Noriko Akatsuka, Susan Strauss, and Bernard Comrie. 192–205. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Kitano, Hiroaki
1999 “On Interaction and Grammar: Evidence from One Use of the Japanese Demonstrative Are (‘that’).” Pragmatics 9 (3): 383–400.
Kluge, Angela
2015 A Grammar of Papuan Malay. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Kudo, Kazuya
2020 “Nihongo Fukakutei Daimeishi Choofuku Hyoogen-no Goika-nitsuite [On the lexicalization of reduplicated underspecified pronominals in Japanese].” Selected Papers from the 44th Meeting of the Kansai Linguistic Society: 29–41.
Lee, Heeju, Danjie Su, and Hongyin Tao
2017 “A Crosslinguistic Study of Some Extended Uses of What-Based Interrogative Expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean.” Chinese Language and Discourse 8 (2): 137–173.
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics, Vol. 21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matras, Yaron
1998 “Deixis and Deictic Oppositions in Discourse: Evidence from Romani.” Journal of Pragmatics 29 (4): 393–428.
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio, and Paloma Núñez Pertejo
Podlesskaya, Vera
2010 “Parameters for Typological Variation of Placeholders.” In Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders, ed. by Nino Amiridze, Boyd Davis, and Margaret Maclagan. 11–32. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rubino, Carl
1996 “Morphological Integrity in Ilocano: A Corpus-Based Study of the Production of Polymorphemic Words in a Polysynthetic Language.” Studies in Language 20 (3): 633–666.
Seraku, Tohru
2020 “Placeholders in Yoron Ryukyuan: A View from Functional Discourse Grammar.” Lingua 2451: 1–18.
Seraku, Tohru, Min-Young Park, and Sayaka Sakaguchi
2021 “A Grammatical Description of the Placeholder Are in Spontaneous Japanese.” Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 50 (1): 65–93.
Seraku, Tohru, Sooyun Park, and Yile Yu
2020 “Non-conventional Placeholders and Morphosyntactic Remedies: Evidence from East Asian Languages.” Ms., Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Kobe University, and Shiga University.
Shibatani, Masayoshi
1990 The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sudo, Yasutada
2008 “Quantification into Quotations: Evidence from Japanese Wh-Doublets.” In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
12
1, ed. by Atle Grønn. 613–627. Oslo: ILOS.
Suga, Ayumi
2018 Soogokooi-niokeru shijihyoogen. [Demonstrative expressions in interaction] Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo Publishing.
Suh, Kyung-Hee
2000 “Distal Demonstratives as Fillers.” Language Research 361: 887–903.
Takubo, Yukinori
2020 “Nominal Deixis in Japanese.” In Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics, ed. by Wesley Jacobsen and Yukinori Takubo. 687–732. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Tárnyiková, Jarmila
2019 “English Placeholders as Manifestations of Vague Language: Their Role in Social Interaction.” Brno Studies in English 45 (2): 201–216.
Wouk, Fay
2005 “The Syntax of Repairs in Indonesian.” Discourse Studies 7 (2): 237–258.
Yoon, Kyung-Eun
2003 “Demonstratives in Korean Conversation as Interactional Resources.” Crossroads of Language, Interaction, and Culture 51: 67–91.
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