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In spontaneous discourse, a speaker sometimes encounters word-formulation trouble, and she may use a 'placeholder' (PH) such as whatchamacallit and you-know-what, a dummy expression to be inserted into the slot of a 'target form' in the sentence structure of an utterance. It has been widely held that there are two types of usage motives: (i) a speaker cannot produce a target form when, e.g., she does not recall it, or (ii) a speaker does not want to produce a target form when, e.g., it is considered taboo. Previous studies have described the grammatical and functional properties of PHs in a variety of languages, but no study has examined their usage-motive patterns crosslinguistically. In this paper, I propose an implicational hierarchy relating to the usage motives of PHs based on the relevance-theoretic notions of 'ability' and 'preference' and derive several predictions from this hierarchy, which are tested against PH data in 56 languages. The predictions are mostly confirmed, with some (putative) counterexamples explained by non-cognitive–pragmatic factors (e.g., lexical-semantic factors). As an implication, the hierarchy may also serve as a basis for drawing predictions in other linguistic fields (e.g., language acquisition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have described a range of placeholder (PH) items. A PH fills in the grammatical slot of a target that a speaker is unable or unwilling to produce. This paper argues that Japanese unnun, an expression wholly underdescribed in the literature, serves as a PH and that it may also be used as a general extender (GE). Unlike previously known PHs, unnun is regarded as a 'meta-discourse' PH; it replaces a discourse segment, rather than a linguistic form. I develop a cognitive-pragmatic account in Relevance theory, arguing that unnun encodes procedural meaning and that the PH and GE functions emerge through interaction among encoded meaning, pragmatic principles, and contextual assumptions. Further, the account situates unnun in the broader picture of vague language in a theoretically coherent manner. I also suggest that some of the previously described PHs in other languages may be re-classified as meta-discourse PHs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese exhibits the Multiple Nominative Construction (MNC), where more than one nominative-marked NP appear within a single clause. Though the MNC has been extensively investigated in the syntax literature, its relation to rightward-displacement constructions has hardly been discussed. In the present article, we provide new sets of MNC data relating to the three types of right-displacement constructions: relatives, clefts, and postposing. The generalisation is that for the linearly ordered nominative-marked NPs in an MNC string, only the leftmost NP may be right-displaced (that is, relativised, clefted, postposed). This pattern is shown to follow as an outcome of modelling incremental parsing, without stipulations specifically made for the observed data. We propose an account of MNCs in the light of an incremental grammar, formalising it within Dynamic Syntax. In this account, an MNC sentence is parsed on a word-by-word basis, and its interpretation is gradually built up, modelled as the growth of a semantic structure. In cases where a right-displacement is permitted, the right-displaced NP is successfully parsed against the structure built by the preceding part of the sentence. In cases where a right-displacement is disallowed, the right-displaced NP cannot be properly processed because the preceding part of the sentence has created no structural position into which the content of the right-displaced NP is reflected. As theoretical implications of the proposed account, we suggest the concept of time-linear grammaticality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a communicator faces a word-formulation problem, they may use a placeholder (PH) such as whatchamacallit to avoid producing a target expression or to delay it. A PH is a dummy element used to fill in the syntactic slot of a target item that a communicator is unable or unwilling to produce (e.g. due to memory lapse). Previous studies have generally been concerned with grammatically stable PHs (e.g. whatchamacallit, you-know-what), 'grammatically stable' in the sense that they are acceptably used (as long as the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic conditions are met) on their own, without a morphosyntactic aid. In this article, we describe 'grammatically unstable' wh-derived PHs in three East Asian languages: Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. To give a specific example, typically, the PH use of Japanese dare 'who' is not fully acceptable unless it is doubled (i.e. dare∼dare) or combines with a non-wh element (e.g. dare-sore, where sore is the medial demonstrative 'that'). We show that the types of such remedial morphosyntactic operations vary from language to language and also within a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Case' and 'grammatical relations' are central to syntactic theory, but rigorous treatments of these concepts in surface-oriented grammars such as Dynamic Syntax are pending. In this respect, Japanese is worthy of mention; in this language, the nominative case particle ga, which typically marks a subject, may mark an object in certain syntactic contexts, and more than one instance of ga may be present within a single clause. These patterns cannot be captured if we simply assume that ga marks a subject. In the present article, we aim to advance formal aspects of the framework, especially the mechanism of 'structural underspecification,' by proposing that the parse of a case particle maximally excludes potential landing sites of an unfixed node at the time of parsing the case particle, delaying the resolution of the unfixed node until a subsequent stage of structure building. This maximal exclusion approach to structural underspecification accounts for a range of case marking patterns and their connections with grammatical relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a speaker encounters a word-formulation problem in interaction, she may use a placeholder to saturate the syntactic slot of the target expression in the unfolding sentence. Japanese exhibits the placeholder are , which is assumed to derive from the demonstrative are 'that.' Despite rich studies on placeholders, no serious attention has been paid to grammatical parallelism and differences between a placeholder and its original lexical counterpart. In this paper, we focus on the nominal placeholder are (and its predicative variants) and the demonstrative are 'that,' and propose the set of criteria which capture their parallelism and differences in non-discrete terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite extensive research on Ryukyuan languages, relatively few attempts have been made to describe Ryukyuan nominalization. This paper sets out the agenda for exploring Ryukyuan nominalization with special reference to Yoron Ryukyuan, which, we propose, has four nominalizers: -si, hutu, munu, and Ø (zero). We divide nominalization into GB (Gap-Based) and GL (Gap-Less) nominalization. Firstly, -si is the most productive; it realizes GB/GL nominalization and derives clefts, relatives, and stance constructions. Secondly, hutu is less productive; its use in GB nominalization is restricted, and it derives only stance constructions. Thirdly, munu is viewed as a formal noun in that it encodes the general meaning 'person, thing' and usually requires a modifying element. Finally, Ø is the least productive, found only in fixed constructions. Based on these observations, we propose a non-discrete view of nominalizer and formal noun and a cline of their productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Yoron Ryukyuan, passives are formed through the verbal suffix ‘-ari’. In this article, we observe that the suffix is used to form a construction distinguished from the standard passives in several respects: (i) attachment of ‘-ari’ to a wide range of predicates, (ii) ‘-ari’ obligatorily coexisting with the clause-linking suffix ‘-ti’, (iii) the case-marking pattern identical to that of active sentences, among other properties. Semantically, this construction expresses that the speaker is affected (typically, in an adversative fashion) by the situation denoted by the ‘-ari’-attached predicate. We call this linguistic unit "Affective Construction" (AC), revealing its unique syntactic and semantic properties. Furthermore, we suggest that the development of ‘-ari’ into ‘-ari-ti’ to constitute the AC may be viewed as an instance of grammaticalisation, with remarks on its generality in line with Unidirectionality and on the licensing conditions on the AC which seem to be uncommon cross-linguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]