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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).

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]

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). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores grammatical and functional properties of mi-nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba 'youth language.' In the standard variety, the suffix -mi nominalizes an adjective stem: fuka-mi 'deep-nmlz' (= 'profoundness'). This suffix is also used in youth language, but its productivity has expanded considerably. To mention a few, -mi applies to not only an adjective (stem) but also a verb, a noun, a pronoun, their phrasal counterparts, and even an onomatopoeia. We claim that these properties of -mi are flexibly captured in the framework of nominalization recently proposed by Masayoshi Shibatani. This framework leads us to describe further unique properties of mi-nominalization, such as "double nominalization" where an already-nominalized form undergoes a further nominalization process and the "sentential use" of a nominalized structure where a nominalized element functions as a sentence, with which an illocutionary speech act is performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]