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Abstract

Abstract

A placeholder is a dummy element with which a speaker fills the grammatical slot of a target form that they are unable or unwilling to produce. Despite the growing body of work on placeholders, no extensive attention has been paid to placeholders in pidgin and creole languages. In this paper, we characterize (cf. ‘the kind’) in Hawai‘i Creole as a placeholder and describe its grammatical and functional properties through examples retrieved from oral histories. Grammatically, is ‘versatile’ in that it replaces diverse elements (e.g. nominal, verbal, adjectival, clausal). Functionally, the uses of are motivated by various factors (e.g. interactional, cognitive). also has other uses as a hesitation marker and a general extender. Furthermore, we suggest a Gricean pragmatic account of and analyze a wide range of its functions as conversational implicatures.

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/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.24014.ser
2025-07-08
2026-04-10

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A versatile placeholder in Hawai‘i Creole
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.24014.ser
/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.24014.ser
/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.24014.ser
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: Hawai‘i Creole ; general extender ; placeholder ; oral history ; conversational implicature ; da kine ; Gricean pragmatics ; hesitation marker

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