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Abstract
In spontaneous discourse, a communicator may be unable or unwilling to produce certain words for contextual reasons. An effective strategy to overcome such difficulties is the use of a placeholder like whatchamacallit. It has been observed that in some languages, demonstrative-related placeholder forms also serve as an interjective hesitator, the type of expression illustrated with um, well, etc. This paper reveals that this functional duality is a broad phenomenon observed with not only demonstratives but also non-demonstrative forms such as wh-words. I investigate non-demonstrative forms in 14 languages and propose a functional account within Discourse Grammar. My contention is twofold: (i) syntactic, semantic, and prosodic differences between placeholders and interjective hesitators are reducible to differences between two grammatical domains, Sentence Grammar and Thetical Grammar; (ii) the functional duality is captured in terms of cooptation, a process whereby a Sentence Grammar unit is transferred to a Thetical Grammar unit.
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