Reviewed by James Murphy, University of Manchester

The work under review brings together a number of articles presented at the workshop ‘Fillers in discourse and grammar’ at the 10th International Pragmatics Association Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, and two articles presented elsewhere.

Barbara A. Fox introduces the book with a discussion on why the study of fillers is of importance to both syntax and our understanding of human interaction. In Ch. 2, Vera I. Podlesskaya looks at Russian and Armenian data (among other languages) and gives an account of which syntactic constituents can be replaced by placeholders, in addition to describing their morphology. Makoto Hayashi and Kyung-Eun Yoon’s chapter shows how speakers use demonstratives in Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin in order to hold their places in conversation when they encounter difficulties in formulating a word.

Nino Amiridze discusses the interesting case of Georgian placeholder verbs which are less frequent than filler nouns like English ‘thingummy’. Not only do these verbs have the function of placeholders when speakers encounter lexical access failure, but, as the article explores, they can also be used deliberately by the speaker, giving rise to a number of pragmatic effects. Dmitry Ganenkov, Yury Lander, and Timur A. Maisak outline the development of placeholders in Udi and Agul, northeast Caucasian languages. Though the languages developed independently, the placeholders in both began as interrogative pronouns and have gained similar nominal and verbal placeholder functions.

Laura Dimock’s article explores fillers in an Austronesian language, Nahavaq. She finds that the different pragmatic functions of the fillers are distinguishable by the different prosodic patterns with which they are produced. She also notes that fillers are allowed to break otherwise strict phonotactic rules. The syntax of Nahavaq fillers is also described. Leelo Keevallik discusses the various functions that the Estonian demonstrative ‘see’ can have when acting as a filler. She finds that ‘see’ is used when introducing repair, to delay the production of a more specific noun and to allow the speaker to avoid using particular grammatical contingencies (typical placeholder functions). ‘See’ has developed other less typical uses, however, when used turn-initially it indicates a change in conversation topic.

Honoré Watanabe surveys fillers in Sliammon Salish, an endangered Native American language. Sliammon’s interjection hesitators do not occur at the word domain and instead are frequently found between morphemes and words, giving rise to Watanabe’s observation that those morphemes are clitics. Problems which arise in studying particles and fillers in under-documented and endangered languages are also touched upon. The final article in the book is Boyd H. Davis and Margaret Maclagan’s study of fillers in the discourse of Alzheimer’s sufferers. They find that speakers with Alzheimer’s are still able to use placeholders, pauses, and fillers appropriately even when the disease has worsened.

This book offers the reader a pertinent reminder that even the smallest of utterances has its use when it comes to the study of language in context. It is recommended for those interested in interactional linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax.