36.2103, Books: Fillers: Pakendorf, Rose (eds.) (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2103. Tue Jul 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2103, Books: Fillers: Pakendorf, Rose (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 08-Jul-2025
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Fillers: Pakendorf, Rose (eds.) (2025)


Title: Fillers
Subtitle: Hesitatives and placeholders
Series Title: Research on Comparative Grammar
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/484

Editor(s): Brigitte Pakendorf, Françoise Rose

eBook

Abstract:

Fillers are non-silent linguistic devices used in disfluencies to gain
time while searching for words. In addition, they are frequently used
intentionally to avoid words for reasons of politeness,
‘conspirational’ motivations, or rhetorical purposes. Two
syntactically distinct types of conventionalized fillers can be
distinguished: placeholders and hesitatives (also called hesitators).
Placeholders are referential and morphosyntactically integrated, while
hesitatives are neither. Strikingly, even though fillers are
cross-linguistically widespread, dedicated studies of such items in
particular languages are still largely lacking.
This collective volume comprises in-depth descriptions of
conventionalized fillers in a substantial variety of languages from
Eurasia, Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, hoping to stimulate
typological research on fillers, both hesitatives and placeholders.
The book aims to contribute to a better visibility of the topic among
general linguists, to make data and analyses accessible that will be
useful for further typological studies on the topic, and to provide
models for descriptive linguists.
The introductory chapter discusses issues emerging from the previous
literature and offers a new typology of fillers. It also highlights
the major findings of the eleven remaining chapters. Each of these
contains a detailed and typologically informed analysis of fillers in
one or several underdescribed languages, based on corpora of natural
speech and focusing on lexical fillers rather than on phenomena below
the word-level (phonetic lengthening, truncation) or above the
word-level (such as idioms and discourse markers like ‘you know’, or
rhetorical questions like ‘what’s the word for that?’). The chapters
cover a large amount of diversity, both in terms of languages and with
respect to the type of filler. They focus on (i) the criteria for
identification of the various types of fillers and the terminology
used, keeping in mind that the domain is still largely under
construction, (ii) a detailed analysis in terms of morphosyntactic
distribution and, if possible, (iii) frequency in speech, and (iv)
some reflection on the diachronic development of these disfluency
markers.

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology
                     Syntax
                     Typology

Written In: English (eng)



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