Placeholder Nouns as Discursive Resources: The Case of chisme

Abstract

Placeholders are linguistic expressions that show an apparent paradox between their great semantic generality and their most prominent function, that of facilitating the identification of referents. At the syntactic level, placeholders are used to fill a syntactic gap in an utterance and serve as substitutes. In Spanish and other languages placeholders based on general nouns show very few semantic features, but have well-established discourse functions. These expressions have been studied in the context of colloquial teenage language (see Núñez Pertejo, 2018); however, they are used by all age groups. In this study I will focus on an analysis of the placeholder chisme and its formal variants based on the COSER corpus, which is composed of oral interviews with generally older rural speakers of European Spanish. The aim of my paper is to establish a detailed profile of this placeholder for European Spanish, its semantic features, discursive functions and striking effects in word search contexts. I will focus specifically on a phenomenon which in a typologically oriented paper by Podlesskaya (2010) is described as “mirroring”, the adoption of formal reflexes of a target, a phenomenon which has not yet been investigated for Spanish.