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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 32:3 (2022) ► pp.426–451

Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholders

ORCID logo | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

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.
Published online: 15 December 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20076.ser
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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
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Seraku, Tohru
2023. Creating placeholders on the fly: A metarepresentational approach. Journal of Pragmatics 210 ► pp. 109 ff. DOI logo
Seraku, Tohru
2023. Grammars for placeholders: The dynamic turn. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8:1 DOI logo
Seraku, Tohru
2024. Placeholders in crosslinguistic perspective: abilities, preferences, and usage motives. Linguistics 0:0 DOI logo
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. DOI logo

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