Grammars for placeholders

The dynamic turn

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22130470
AutoresTohru Seraku (0000-0002-6684-4826, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen8
Número1
Fecha de publicación2023-01-04
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGlossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835
EditorialOpen Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.16995/glossa.9174
OpenAlexW4311536903
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas45

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

Dialogic · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Parsing · Programming language · Rule-based machine translation · Syntax · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Psychology · Speech and dialogue systems · Artificial Intelligence