Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders

Fillers are items that speakers insert in spontaneous speech as a repair strategy. Types of fillers include hesitation markers and placeholders. Both are used to fill pauses that arise during planning problems or in lexical retrieval failure. However, while hesitation markers may not bear any resemblance to lexical items they replace, placeholders typically share some morphosyntactic properties with the target form. Additionally, fillers can function as a pragmatic tool, in order to replace lexical items that the speaker wants to avoid mentioning for some reason. The present volume is the first collection on the topic of fillers and will be a useful reference work for future investigations on the topic. It consists of typological surveys and in-depth studies exploring the form and use of fillers across languages and sections of different populations, including cognitively impaired speakers. The volume will be interesting to typologists and linguists working in discourse studies.

Laurel Smith Stvan, in Studies in Language 35(4): 945-950:
This book not only provides breadth in the variety of languages discussed across the chapters, but several of the chapters also provide typological surveys of ways that particular placeholders behave across larger sets of languages via corpora, elicitations, and reports from the literature. Thus, this volume's findings will be a valuable recourse for typologists. The volume is of value, as well, to linguists working on discourse structuring.