Call for papers: Placeholders in East and West

Organizers: Wiltrud Mihatsch and Inga Hennecke (University of Tübingen) (Funded by the DFG)
Date: October 9th – 11th 2024
Venue: University of Tübingen

Placeholders such as eng. thingy or whatchamacallit or French truc, machin, bidule, chose (often, but not only, nouns) do not differ from lexemes in their syntactic distribution. However, unlike lexemes, they do not contribute to the proposition through their semantic content. They rather function as placeholders for lexemes, during word-finding problems in the formulation process, to fill lexical gaps, but also in the context of taboos and deliberate avoidance of lexical specification in contexts where variables are needed, e.g. in generalizing statements or text templates. They are mostly spoken language phenomena, however, notably their use as a variable seems rather linked to formal written language. Their range of communicative functions is reminiscent of pragmatic markers, while the substitution of lexemes is reminiscent of pronouns.
In the past, special features of placeholders have repeatedly been described in rather isolated small-scale publications, have been stigmatized in prescriptive contexts and are generally not the main research focus of linguists up to this day, although the volume by Amiridze/Davis/Maclagan (2010) has managed to bring together different strands of research on placeholders from a cross-linguistic perspective for the first time. In recent years, a number of new publications on placeholders have appeared, particularly in Asia and Europe, which tackle fine-grained syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic analyses. In 2022 Françoise Rose and Brigitte Pakendorf organized a workshop on “Fillers and Placeholders” at the ALT conference in Austin. We believe that it is important to pursue this line of research, while concentrating on placeholders, and to bring together researchers who are currently investigating placeholders worldwide in order to discuss questions that remain unanswered. Our aim is not only to clarify the status of placeholders, but also to shed new light on the fundamental problem of categorizing lexis, grammar, and pragmatic markers by looking at borderline cases and transitions.
The conference will provide a platform for researchers with a dedicated interest in the topic and we hope the conference will help us to gain new insights into this peculiar category of linguistic expressions from a comparative linguistic perspective and different theoretical and methodological frameworks. So far, talks on placeholders in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georgian, Hebrew, North Siberian languages, Japanese and Chinese are planned. Further talks or posters on any language of the world (including Creole languages) are welcome.

The talks or posters should address one or several of the following aspects and phenomena:
(a) Formal morphosyntactic or phonological properties of placeholders distinguishing them from lexemes and pronouns
b) Semantic properties of placeholders
c) Discourse functions of placeholders
d) The diachronic evolution of placeholders
e) Crosslinguistic, typological or comparative aspects of placeholders
f) Their relations with neighboring and/or overlapping phenomena such as pronouns, shell nouns, filler or hesitation markers and uses of general nouns beyond lexical substitution.

We are looking forward to receiving abstracts in English of a maximum of 700 words (including references) and would like to ask you to specify whether you would like to present a talk (30 minutes incl. discussion) or a poster. The congress fee, which covers the coffee breaks, is 30 €.
Please send your abstracts until March 31 2024 to Wiltrud Mihatsch (w.mihatsch@uni-tuebingen.de)
Notification of acceptance will take place until May 15 2024.

References
Amiridze, N.; Davis, B. & Maclagan, M. (2010) (eds.). Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders. [Typological Studies in language (TSL), vol. 93]. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Cheung, L. Y. (2015). Uttering the unutterable with wh-placeholders. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 24, 271–308.
Cutting, J. (2015). Dingsbums und so: beliefs about German vague language. Journal of Pragmatics 85, 108–121.
Enfield, N. J. (2003). The definition of what-d’you-call-it: semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis. Journal of Pragmatics 35, 101-117.
Fronek, J. (1982). Thing as a function word, Linguistics 20, 633-654.
Hennecke, I. & Mihatsch, W. (2022). French machin, truc: filler functions and degrees of prosodic prominence. In: Beeching, K. (ed.). Discourse-Pragmatic Markers, Fillers and Filled Pauses. Pragmatics and Cognition 29:2, 297-323.
Ivaniĉ, R. (1991). Nouns in search of a context: A study of nouns with both open- and closed-system characteristics, IRAL 29.1: 93-114.
Kaye, A. 1990. Whatchamacallem. A consideration of thingummies, doohickeys and other vague words. English Today 6(1), 70-73.
Kleiber, G. (1987). Mais à quoi sert donc le mot chose ?, Langue française 72, 109-128.
Jin, Y. & Chen, X. (2020). “Mouren” (“Somebody”) can be you-know-who. Journal of Pragmatics 164, 1–15.
Núnez Pertejo, P. (2018). A contrastive study of placeholders in the speech of British and Spanish teenagers. In Ziegler, A., (ed.), Jugendsprachen/Youth Languages: Aktuelle Perspektiven internationaler Forschung/Current Perspectives of International Research, Teilband 1, Berlin & Boston: de Gruyter, 391–417.
Seraku, T.; Park, S. & Yu, Y. (2022). Grammatically unstable placeholders and morpho-syntactic remedies: evidence from East Asian languages. Folia Linguistica, vol. 56, no. 2, 2022, 389-421. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2022-2030
Seraku, T. (2022). Interactional and rhetorical functions of placeholders. Journal of Pragmatics 187, 118–129.
Vogel, P.. (2020). Dingsbums and thingy: Placeholders for names in German and other languages. In Körtvélyessy, L. & Štekauer, P. (eds.), Complex words: Advances in morphology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 362–383.