Grammatically unstable placeholders and morpho-syntactic remedies: evidence from East Asian languages

Abstract

Abstract 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.