Grammars for placeholders: The dynamic turn

Abstract

In verbal communication, when a speaker encounters a word-formulation problem (e.g. memory lapse), she may resort to several linguistic strategies, including the use of a placeholder (PH). A PH is a dummy item with which a speaker fills in the syntactic slot of a target form that she is unable or unwilling to produce. There is a growing body of work investigating PHs in a variety of languages, but the bulk of extant studies provide a descriptive and/or functional analysis and little attention has been paid to formal modelling. In the present article, we offer a wide range of PH examples in Japanese, French, and German, including new data on gender mismatches, and develop a formal account in Dynamic Syntax. We propose a general mechanism to process a PH time-linearly and show how it is implemented in the grammars of several languages. In this analysis, a PH-involving string is parsed incrementally, and a conceptual structure is built up progressively, during which a PH introduces a meta-variable, to be updated based on the parse of a target form on an unfixed node or a LINKed node. The account is further extended to various PH-involving dialogic phenomena in talk-in-interaction.