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
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Corpora
The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ): The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
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