Filler Verbs in Modern Georgian

• Main Author: Nino Amiridze
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chukchi
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.565.8041; http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/n.amiridze/papers/fillers/Amiridze.pdf

Cross-linguistically filler nouns and verbs are used when speakers cannot recall a lexical item; when they cannot choose the right lexical item because of lacking education, knowledge or infor-mation; or when they intentionally avoid verbalization for different pragmatic reasons. Among filler nouns are the English thingummy, German Dingsbums and Italian coso/cosa (derived from the noun cosa ”thing”). There are filler verbs of various origin across languages that serve as placehold-ers for synthetic verb forms in discourse. For instance, [Sko77] and [Dun99] report Chukchi filler verbs based on the interrogative/indefinite stem req- meaning “do what”, “do something”. Some languages use an inflected dummy stem derived from the lexical item thing (Italian cosare (1), Eng-lish thingo (2) from [Pow91]), others make use of a grammaticalized root originally meaning “do” (Japanese are suru (3) from [Kit99, pp. 390-391]) or Georgian imaskna, the focus of this paper (see (4a) from [Zos80, p. 192], (4b), (5) as well a [Ami04]). According to [FHJ96], formal means used in repair strategies are highly dependent on the mor-phological characteristics of the language. For instance, to construct verbal fillers, analytical lan-guages would use a dummy noun compounded with an auxiliary while synthetic languages would use an affixed dummy root. Some languages employing both affixation and analytical formation