Functions of placeholder words in Evenki

Placeholders are used to fill in the pause when the speaker has forgotten the exact word. They have the syntactic properties of the word the speaker cannot recall (the target word). Studying placeholders is thus important for understanding how discourse works. However, the area has been much understudied, especially for low-resource languages, due to the lack of oral corpora. This paper fills in this lacuna for the Evenki language. It describes the functions of placeholders and their grammatical properties, drawing on data from oral corpora and elicitation. More specifically, it looks into the transfer of grammatical features from the target word to the placeholder. Dialectal distribution of placeholders and their correlates in other Tungusic languages are also discussed.