Pragmatic Analysis of Placeholders in Spoken Kazakh

Abstract

My research project is related to placeholders, which unlike hesitatives, can be described as words that occupy the syntactic position of the intended lexical word by making the speech cohesive despite having to use another word for substitution (Seraku et al. 2022: 123). Despite placeholders being extensively documented in East Asian languages (Japanese, Korean) and European Languages, Turkic languages remain understudied in this area. To address this gap my project proposes to examine placeholders for their interactional functions in spoken Kazakh via pragmatic analysis and establish if there are any cross-linguistic similarities. The value of this research is to provide a first systematic documentation of placeholder functions in spoken Kazakh. I used mixed-methods in order to combine quantitative distributional analysis with qualitative analytic interpretation of the conversation. My full data set (194 tokens) is derived from a Kazakh corpus (124) and Kazakh podcast (72) called ‘20-25 ’, which discusses social and behavioral problems, patterns, and empowers women. All of the examples were documented, transcribed, glossed (examples in the capstone), and categorized into 4 semantic groups: interrogative-based, demonstrative-based, adverbial-based, verbal-based and 5 interactional functions: discourse cohesion/shared knowledge, repair/lexical search, referential vagueness/avoidance, generic/indefinite reference, floor holding (only for podcast data). In (1) complex placeholder (consisting of two or more placeholders, in this case žaŋaɣï 'the one mentioned/discussed previously', 'that one', and kim-niŋ [who-GEN] meaning 'whose' is used. This shows interrogative placeholder kimniŋ in lexical search function. Though žaŋaɣï also appears (typically associated with discourse-cohesion/shared knowledge), the primary function of this particular example is name retrieval, which is why kimniŋ fills the slot during lexical access difficulty. The utterance’s main purpose is searching for a specific name, thus lexical search dominates. (1) Al sonïŋ aldïnda bir ay ɣana burïn Säken resmiy türde žaŋaɣï kimniŋ Kreml'de Staliynniŋ qabïldauwïnda bolɣan al so-nïŋ aldï-n-da bir ay ɣana burïn Säken resmiy But that-GEN front-ACC-LOC one month just before name official türde jaŋaɣï kim-niŋ Kreml'-de Staliyn-niŋ qabïlda-uw-ïn-da way PH PH PROP.N-LOC name-GEN accept-VN-ACC-LOC bol-ɣan. COP-PTCP ‘But only one month before that, Säken had officially been to Kreml’ at whatchamacallit Stalin’s reception.’ As for the findings, we can establish that Kazakh does showcase the above-mentioned four-class placeholder system, with interrogative-based and demonstrative-based dominating over others (approximately 81.9% when combined). It replicates the cross-linguistic pattern found in Japanese and Korean, SOV languages, regarding case-marking integration, multiple interactional functions, and morphosyntactic well-formedness and extends them to Turkic languages. Moreover, Kazakh displays high grammatical stability, which showcases that the placeholder is able to stand by itself and function as a lexical unit without the need of any assistance, due to its rich agglutinative morphology. Though Kazakh does in fact utilize the combination method with demonstratives (e.g., ana/anaw, kimniŋ/neniŋ), it is not a mandatory strategy as the placeholder can function perfectly without it while occupying a syntactic slot through the genitive case suffix -NIŋ, without falling under the category of ungrammatical. This suggests that having agglutinative morphology might result in higher placeholder stability in languages.