Placeholders in written language: The case of Japanese kō and otsu

Abstract

A communicator is sometimes unable or unwilling to produce a particular expression. One of the lexical resources for overcoming such word-formulation difficulties is the use of placeholders like whatchamacallit and you-know-what. Whilst recent years have seen a proliferation of research on placeholders across diverse languages, prior studies have largely focussed on spoken language, with little attention paid to their use in writing. This paper reveals that Japanese has placeholders that appear almost exclusively in written language, predominantly in legal texts. First, we describe the distributional and grammatical properties of the placeholders kō and otsu through a theory-neutral analysis of data retrieved from The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. Second, building on this descriptive foundation, we propose a cognitive account of their semantic and pragmatic aspects within the framework of Relevance Theory. We argue that kō and otsu encode procedural meaning and demonstrate how specific interpretations, both explicit and implicit, arise from the interaction among procedural meaning, contextual assumptions, and pragmatic principles. The present work advances the scholarship of placeholders by providing the first detailed account of placeholders in written language and by developing a semantic–pragmatic integrated approach to their contextual interpretation.