A corpus-based investigation of fillers in Negidal
(Northern Tungusic)

Brigitte Pakendorf

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To cite this version:

Brigitte Pakendorf. A corpus-based investigation of fillers in Negidal (Northern Tungusic). Brigitte Pakendorf; Françoise Rose. Fillers: Hesitatives and placeholders, Language Science Press, pp.75-129, 2025, 10.5281/zenodo.15697579. hal-05163968

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# A corpus-based investigation of fillers in Negidal (Northern Tungusic)

Brigitte Pakendorf

Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (CNRS & Université Lumière Lyon 2)

The Northern Tungusic language Negidal, which is spoken in the Russian Far East by barely a handful of elderly speakers, is a language with a dedicated filler, namely the root *uŋun*. As shown by an investigation of a corpus of annotated oral recordings comprising over 200 texts of diverse genres (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017), this filler is frequently used: over 880 tokens of *uŋun* are found in ~76,000 Negidal words, amounting to nearly 12 tokens/1000 words; however, there are large inter-speaker differences. About 70% of the occurrences of the filler are used as place-holders for either nouns or verbs, and occasionally even clauses or direct speech. Targets are frequently omitted; when present, it is inflectional, but not derivational, morphology that is mirrored on the placeholder. This mirroring demonstrates that speakers plan the syntactic frame of their utterance well in advance, with differences between less and more proficient speakers. Although the filler is used when speakers have difficulties accessing a word, that is not the only factor triggering its use, as shown by the fact that as a placeholder it often stands in for common lexemes or items that were mentioned in the immediately preceding discourse. The Negidal data add to our knowledge of the as-yet understudied domain of fillers and open up further questions concerning the management of disfluencies in Negidal.

keywords: disfluency, hesitation, placeholder, speech planning

## 1 Introduction

Speakers who experience problems with the “planning and execution of speech” (Lickley 2015: 452) have various means at their disposal to signal their difficulties and to play for time while searching for an elusive word or planning how to

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>
continue their discourse, such as pausing or drawing out final syllables. Another
option is to use a FILLER, an overt marker of hesitation with a conventionalized
form (Clark & Fox Tree 2002). Two common strategies – not necessarily mutually
exclusive – for this type of delay function can be distinguished: PLACEHOLDERS
that substitute for a particular word (the target item) and that are thus fully inte-
grated referential expressions, and HESITATIVES, non-referential markers of hes-
itation that are not syntactically integrated (Hayashi & Yoon 2006). Such fillers
often develop out of demonstratives (Hayashi & Yoon 2006), indefinite pronouns,
interrogative pronouns, or semantically bleached nouns, but can also lexicalize
out of phrases, such as English whatchamacallit (Podlesskaya 2010: 12–13).

Negidal (ISO-639: neg, glottocode: negi1245), a Northern Tungusic language
of the Lower Amur region, has a dedicated filler *uŋun* (glossed FLR in all the
examples) with opaque etymology (however, see Klyachko 2025 [this volume]
for a possible origin as an interrogative pronoun). This can function as both a
placeholder (1, 2) and a hesitative (3). In its placeholder use *uŋun* can stand in for
both nouns (1) and verbs (2).

(1) gə əmə-tca-βun (2050) uŋu-l-βəj (2770) tigə-l-βəj
dp come-PST-1PL.EX FLR-PL-PRFL.PL dish-PL-PRFL.PL
na:-tca-βun taj ugi-la
put-PST-1PL.EX dist top-LOC

‘Well, we arrived and put our whatchamacallits, our dishes at the top.’

[GIK_2tatarskoe: 112; ID 732]

(2) taj komalan-ma tcak-mi ti: (0) uŋun-ə-s (0)
dist fur.rug-ACC gather-SS.COND like.this FLR-NFUT-2SG
atal-i-s
take.off-NFUT-2SG

‘That fur rug... gathering you whatchamacallit, you take off (the scalp)
like this.’

[DIN_duck_heads: 14; ID 571]

(3) i:-ji-fi-j... i:-ji-fi-j gəsə
enter-PRS.PTCP-INS-PRFL.SG enter-PRS.PTCP-INS-PRFL.SG together.NNC
(2180) uŋunə (1760) su:n-mi bu:-jə-n loko-da-tin
FLR coat-PRFL.SG give-NFUT-3SG hang.up-VS.PURP-3PL

‘As soon as she entered... uhm... she gave her coat for (them) to hang it.’

[DIN_restoren: 4; ID 671]

The examples are sourced with the text identifier plus the number of the an-
notation unit and can be found in Pakendorf & Aralova (2017). In addition, the
unique ID from the coding sheet that underlies the analysis presented in this
paper is provided; the coding sheet and further supplementary material can be
found in the Negidal fillers dataset: https://hdl.handle.net/11403/negidal-fillers.
Note that I add ‘whatchamacallit’ – for both nominal and verbal uses – or ‘uhm’
to the translations of examples in order to facilitate their understanding, even
when the filler was not translated by our consultants. Furthermore, I add the
length of pauses preceding and following the filler to the text line in parenthe-
ses, in milliseconds rounded to tens and with ‘no pause’ being shown as 0. In
examples with more than one filler, it is only the relevant filler that is marked in
this way; this is furthermore highlighted in bold, with the target, where relevant,
underlined.

In their discussion of demonstratives as fillers, Hayashi & Yoon (2006: 488) dis-
tinguish three “related but distinct usage types”, namely placeholders, avoidance
markers, and hesitives. I did not identify any obvious avoidance use<fnref n="1" /> for the
Negidal filler *uŋun*, and given the highly culture-specific and context-sensitive
nature of such items, and without the possibility to discuss the data with speak-
ers, I feel I would not be reliably able to do so. This article therefore focuses on
placeholder and hesitative uses of the filler *uŋun* in Negidal in order to enrich
our knowledge of this as yet understudied domain. It has two major goals: to
describe the morphosyntactic characteristics of the filler and to investigate the
cognitive and interactional aspects of its use.

My study is based on a corpus of transcribed, translated, and glossed oral
recordings (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017; see §2 for details), with the preliminary
typology established by Podlesskaya (2010) as my theoretical point of departure.
This was considerably extended, however, by the novel insights found in the
other chapters included in this volume. The rest of the chapter is structured as
follows: the data and methodology of the study are introduced in §2, and the
distinction (or lack thereof) between the placeholder and hesitative strategy of
the filler is addressed in §3. The subsequent section is dedicated to a detailed
description of the Negidal filler, with various morphosyntactic characteristics
outlined in §4.1 and the differences in use between speakers discussed in §4.2.
The pragmatic and cognitive aspects of use of the filler are the topic of §5, and
the paper concludes with a brief discussion in §6.

<footnote n="1">¹This refers to the use of fillers to replace words that are socially or culturally sensitive, use of which might be perceived as impolite or offensive (Hayashi & Yoon 2006: 501–507).</footnote>
## 2 Data and methodology

Negidal, a close sister of the better-known and better-described language Evenki (Oskolskaya 2024; own knowledge), is spoken on the Lower Amur river and its tributary, the Amgun', in the Russian Far East. Although two dialects, Upper and Lower Negidal, are known (Myl'nikova & Cincius 1931, Pevnov & Khasanova 2006: 453), nowadays at most a handful of elderly women speak the Upper dialect, and the Lower dialect is extinct (Kalinina 2008: 272, Pakendorf & Aralova 2018). It is a morphologically rich language (Pakendorf & Aralova 2020), with nominal inflectional morphology comprising nine cases (including the unmarked Nominitive) and possessive suffixes that index the person and number of the possessor;<fnref n="2" /> singular number is unmarked as opposed to the marked plural. Verbs carry diverse tense, aspect, mood, and valency-changing suffixes as well as obligatory subject indexes; they are negated with analytical constructions consisting of the inflected negative auxiliary ə- and the lexical verb carrying an invariant suffix (here glossed as *neg.cvb* 'Negative Converb'; cf. Hölzl 2015). Common nominal derivational suffixes include the Diminutives -kan and -tcan and the "Decessive" suffix (which designates deceased individuals) -ŋasa; frequent verbal derivational suffixes include the Associated Motion suffix -na and various Aktionsart markers, such as the Accelerative -maltca or the Multiplicative -kta. Although objects are not indexed, both subjects and objects are frequently omitted in spontaneous speech.

The recordings on which this study is based were made in the village of Vladimirovka (Polina Osipenko district, Khabarovsk Krai) at different times by different individuals (Table 1): in the 1990s, a female speaker (TIN) taped herself reading or reciting excerpts of narratives for use as little lessons of Negidal broadcast by the regional radio station, and a male speaker (APK) telling folktales was taped by a linguist and, on a different occasion, by an ethnologist; these different cassette tapes<fnref n="3" /> were subsequently digitized for a large documentation project (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017). Between 2005 and 2010 the oldest speaker still alive at the time (APN) and three of her daughters (DIN, GIK, LIO) were recorded by a team of Russian linguists (Kalinina 2013), and in 2017 and 2020 further recordings were made by Natalia Aralova and myself (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017). The codes used to refer to the speakers are abbreviations of the speakers' first name, patronymic, and surname.

<footnote n="2">²These are glossed only with the person and number, not with a separate gloss to indicate the possession (i.e. *ge:-β* 'my friend' is glossed as *friend-1SG* and not *friend-PX.1SG*).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³Unfortunately, we have absolutely no metadata for any of these tape recordings.</footnote>
<table><caption>Table 1: Some characteristics of the text corpus</caption><thead><tr><th>Speaker</th><th>Sex</th><th>Birthyear</th><th>Comment</th><th># words</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>APN</td><td>F</td><td>1916</td><td></td><td>21,900</td></tr><tr><td>APK</td><td>M</td><td>1921</td><td></td><td>4,200</td></tr><tr><td>TIN</td><td>F</td><td>1940</td><td>daughter of APN</td><td>7,800</td></tr><tr><td>DIN</td><td>F</td><td>1942</td><td>daughter of APN</td><td>29,000</td></tr><tr><td>GIK</td><td>F</td><td>1945</td><td>daughter of APN</td><td>8,500</td></tr><tr><td>AET</td><td>F</td><td>1947</td><td></td><td>2,500</td></tr><tr><td>LIO</td><td>F</td><td>1948</td><td>daughter of APN</td><td>600</td></tr><tr><td>AVK</td><td>F</td><td>1950</td><td>niece of APK</td><td>960</td></tr><tr><td>GIKlju</td><td>F</td><td>1955</td><td></td><td>310</td></tr></tbody></table>

Overall, over 18 hours of recordings have been transcribed, translated, and glossed; these comprise over 200 texts of diverse genres (mainly folklore and real-life anecdotes, but also conversations and procedural texts) amounting to ~78,000 words (~76,000 excluding larger switches to Russian) and 14,100 annotation units. The corpus is far from being balanced, since only nine speakers are represented, eight women and only one man (APK); of these, only four are still alive at the time of writing. Furthermore, the contributions of individual speakers are far from equal, and five of the represented speakers are closely related, namely APN and four of her daughters (Table 1). All of the speakers used or use languages other than Negidal regularly in daily life: Evenki and Russian for APK and APN (who in addition spoke Nanai during her childhood and adolescence), and Russian for the younger speakers. The source of lexemes or morphemes of non-Negidal origin is indicated in the glosses with the following abbreviations: EVK: Evenki; NNC: Nanaic (i.e. a lexeme that could have its source in Nanai, Ulch, or Orok/Uilta); R: Russian; Y: Sakha (also known as Yakut).

The filler *uŋun* was extracted via concordance search in the FieldWorks<fnref n="4" /> database in which the texts have been glossed. In order to verify the reliability of the transcription as well as to obtain prosodic information, each utterance was checked by listening to the recording in ELAN<fnref n="5" /> and subsequently coded for diverse information on the morphosyntax of the filler and its target, where relevant, as well as on various aspects of its use (see the coding definitions deposited with

<footnote n="4">⁴FieldWorks Language Explorer version 9.1, SIL International.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ELAN Linguistic Annotator version 6.5, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan</footnote>
the Negidal fillers dataset<fnref n="6" /> for details). In total, 882 tokens of *unun* were coded
in this way and then analysed in Excel.

Since assigning a strategy to the filler or identifying which element might be
the target of a particular placeholder was very difficult for many of the tokens,
in a second step I investigated the intonation pattern of all the utterances con-
taining fillers using Praat.<fnref n="7" /> For this, my colleague Jennifer Krzonowski wrote a
script that cut each utterance out of its recording context and annotated it with
the transcription in one tier. I myself then added a second tier with the location
of the filler and the position and duration of surrounding pauses, where relevant.
In a final step, the script automatically drew the waveform plus pitch contour.<fnref n="8" />
The intonation patterns were inspected individually to identify the strategy of
each token of the filler, with the larger context, the translation provided by our
consultants in the field and notes from clarification sessions on what form the
filler should have taken, as well as clues from video recordings taken into account
where possible. Nevertheless, it was impossible to assign a strategy to 24 tokens
(2.7% of the total), either because the context was too unclear or because they
carried morphology that did not make any morphosyntactic sense; these were
coded as ‘unclear’. Furthermore, as will be discussed in the following section, it
is impossible to always distinguish between the hesitative and the placeholder
strategy, and 50 tokens (5.7%) were coded as ‘indeterminate’, following the ter-
minology of Billings & McDonnell 2025 [this volume].

3 Placeholders vs. hesitatives

As mentioned in the introduction, the distinction between placeholders and hes-
itatives is assumed to lie in the syntactic integration of the filler: hesitatives are
not morphologically integrated, can occur anywhere in the sentence, and do not
have referential use (Hayashi & Yoon 2006: 512), while placeholders are mor-
phologically and syntactically fully integrated referential expressions (Hayashi
& Yoon 2006: 490). However, Hayashi & Yoon (2006) base their analysis primar-
ily on Japanese and Korean, where distinct elements express the two strategies,

<footnote n="6">⁶https://hdl.handle.net/11403/negidal-fillers</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Praat version 6.1.37, Paul Boersma and David Weenink.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸Note that the figures in this chapter were produced manually by myself in order to be able to adjust the annotation and font size; in addition, whereas the Praat script worked with the sound files extracted from the videos, if these exist, I based the figures on the original sound file as recorded with a Marantz or Zoom audio recorder to maximize the quality. The data deposited in the Negidal fillers dataset (https://hdl.handle.net/11403/negidal-fillers) hence occasionally contain two sound files and Textgrids for a token of the filler.</footnote>
gaze aversion that accompanies hesitation uses of the filler has been described for Swedish (Allwood et al. 2005), Dutch (Jehoul et al. 2016), and Northern Passaza Kichwa (Rice 2025 [this volume]). It has been suggested that it allows the speaker to “concentrate on the organization of the utterance” while also being a signal of “his intention to continue to hold the floor” (Kendon 1967: 42) and is characteristic of conversations rather than of monologic situations such as class presentations (Kosmala 2022).

(5) nu i vseg... i o:kin=da bi-βki (1420) uŋun (900)
PTL.R and.R FS and.R when=ADD COP-HAB.PTCP FLR
aja hul-la-βun aja-t
good go-NFUT-1PL.EX good-ADVR
‘And we always... uhm... go well.’
[AVK_crossing_stream: 142; ID 502]

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: (a) Speech waveform and pitch contour of example (5). The annotation “V1, V2, V3” indicates the approximate timepoint of the video stills shown below the intonation pattern. (b) Three still frames taken from the video recording of example (5).</figcaption></figure>

In contrast, instances in which the filler carries morphology can often be straightforwardly recognized as having a placeholder function, such as in (2),
repeated here as (6): the filler carries the same Non-Future tense marker and 2SG subject index as the target *atalis* ‘you take off’, there are no pauses surrounding the filler, and the pitch and the waveform intensity of *uŋun* are as high as those of the rest of the utterance (Figure 3; note that the pitch line of the first syllable of *atalis* is erroneously missing).

(6) taj komalan-ma tɔak-mi ti: (0) uŋun-ə-s (0) DIST fur.rug-ACC gather-SS.COND like.this FLR-NFUT-2SG atal-i-s take.off-NFUT-2SG

‘That fur rug... gathering you whatchamacallit, you take off (the scalp) like this.’

[DIN_duckayo: 14; ID 571]

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3: Waveform and pitch contour of example (6)</figcaption></figure>

The two instances of *uŋun* in (7) are equally easy to identify as placeholders: they carry nominal case suffixes, there is no pause, and the pitch and waveform intensity are at the same level as those of the rest of the utterance (Figure 4a). Note that the element *aaaa* entered in brackets is an interjection by the speaker’s interlocutor, and that the verb *dostan’tas* ‘you got hold of something’ is not reflected in the pitch contour. While the first placeholder is followed by its target *ogurcyβə* ‘cucumbers’, the second one holds the place of the intended target ‘cellar’ by itself. It is preceded by a pointing gesture in the general direction of the cellar opening (Figure 4b). A similar pointing gesture accompanies the Komnzo placeholder in its use to fill in for a place name (Döhler 2025 [this volume]).
(7) tadukin (0) uŋun-ma (60) ogurcybə o:-pla-βa taj
then FLR-ACC cucumbers.R-ACC make-PASS.PTCP-ACC DIST

(0) uŋun-duki (0) dostan’-tca-s
FLR-ABL get.R-PST-2SG

‘Then you got whatchamacallit, marinated cucumbers from that
whatchamacallit [the cellar].’
[AVK_GIK_wine: 12; ID 525-526]

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4: (a) Waveform and pitch contour of example (7). The annotation “V” shows the approximate timepoint of the still frame shown below the intonation pattern. (b) Still frame taken from the video recording of example (7).</figcaption></figure>

However, matters are far from always being so straightforward. While mor-
phologically marked fillers tend to function as placeholders, this is not in itself a
sufficient criterion to identify an instance of filler use as a placeholder, because the hesitatively used filler sometimes ends in an epenthetic schwa or [e] (e.g. (4)), making it identical to both the Non-Future 3PL and the Negative Converb form of the verb, *uŋunə*. This is illustrated by the following, very long example (8), where there are four fillers, all with identical form, *uŋune*, and no clear distinctions in pitch or intensity of the waveform (Figure 5), albeit with longer pauses after the first and third token than after the second and fourth token. Note that due to the length of the example I exceptionally show only the location of the filler (abbreviated as ‘flr’ in the figure) on one tier and the location and duration of the surrounding pauses on the second tier. The second and fourth token are identifiable as verbal placeholders, as shown by the fact that they follow upon the negative auxiliary *odan* ‘so that it (does) not’ and precede their targets, the negated verbs *alillə* ‘(not) get angry’ and *anutṭe* ‘(not) push away’. The first and third token, in contrast, are likely to be hesitatives, since they are not syntactically integrated. The first one comes at a point where the speaker decides to re-structure her sentence: after starting off with what seems to have been intended as a definition of the concept *holgin*, she switches to the 1PL.EX subject pronoun *bu* ‘we’, but then starts over with *oj bisi boga* ‘this place where (we) live’ as the subject. The third token of *uŋune* intervenes in the clause *o:n gunə sagdil, boga noŋanman guŋandan* ‘as the old people say, in order for the earth to take pity (on people)’. This shows clearly that even though they are similar in both intonation and form, these tokens of the filler represent two different strategies of filler use.

<table><tr><td>(8)</td><td>taj holgi-ja</td><td>holgin</td><td>èto bu</td><td>(280)</td><td>uŋune</td><td>(1690)</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>DIST</td><td>do.holgin-NFUT[3PL]</td><td>holgin.ritual this.R</td><td>1PL.EX</td><td>FLR</td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>oj bi-si</td><td>boga o-da-n</td><td>(210)</td><td>uŋun-e</td><td>(1000)</td><td>taj</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>PROX</td><td>live-PRS.PTCP</td><td>place NEG-VS.PURP-3SG</td><td>FLR-NEG.CVB</td><td>DIST</td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>bəjə-tki</td><td>ali-l-lə</td><td>ili o:n gunə</td><td>sagdi-l</td><td>(0)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>person-ALL</td><td>be.angry-INCH-NEG.CVB</td><td>or.R how say-NFUT[3PL]</td><td>old-PL</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>uŋune</td><td>(2760)</td><td>boga noŋanman guŋan-da-n</td><td>o-da-n</td><td>(0)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>FLR</td><td>nature 3SG.ACC</td><td>pity-VS.PURP-3SG</td><td>NEG-VS.PURP-3SG</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>uŋun-e</td><td>(560)</td><td>anut-ṭe</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>FLR-NEG.CVB</td><td></td><td>push.away-NEG.CVB</td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr></table>

‘The holgin ritual is... we... **uhm**... so that our nature that we live in, so that it does **not whatchamacallit**, **not get angry at people**, as the old people say... **uhm**... so that the nature takes pity on people, so that it does **not whatchamacallit**, **not push him away** [from itself].’

[GIK_ostroe: 25; ID 778-781]
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5: Waveform and pitch contour of example (8)</figcaption></figure>

Furthermore, while the filler used as a hesitative stands in its bare form, the Nominative case in Negidal, which is the case taken by subjects, predicate nominals, or possessors, is also zero-marked. Hence morphologically unmarked tokens of the filler cannot automatically be interpreted as hesitives, since a bare filler can be a placeholder that is substituting for a subject, predicate nominal, or possessor ((9) and Figure 6; cf. Rice 2025 [this volume], for a similar problem with morphologically unmarked tokens of the filler *mashti* in Northern Pastaza Kichwa). It can also stand in for noun phrases or adjectives in predicative position, and even for clauses or direct speech (see §4.1.4 and §4.1.5 for details).

(9) ne pavel hutə-βa-n
not.R PN offspring-ACC-3SG FLR offspring-ACC-3SG
{APN:... the older son of Avujin pushed...} {DIN: whom, Pavel's child?}
APN: ‘not Pavel’s child, **whatchamacallit’s** child

[APN_tri_soseda: 100; ID 467]

There are also a few instances when the bare filler appears to be used as a
placeholder for a morphologically marked target (such as the Accusative case-
marked noun ‘soil’ in (10)), a cross-linguistically not uncommon phenomenon
(Podlesskaya 2010: 18–19). That *uŋun* is used as a placeholder, and not a hesitative,
in these instances is suggested by the fact that the pitch on the filler is as high as
that of the preceding word, the intensity of the waveform is as strong as in the
rest of the utterance, and there are practically no pauses (Figure 7).
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6: Waveform and pitch contour of example (9)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7: Waveform and pitch contour of example (10)</figcaption></figure>

Like the form, intonation is also not always a sure indicator of the strategy of the filler, as shown by (11): here the filler carries the Accusative case found on the target and is thus identifiable as a placeholder, yet it is surrounded by
long pauses (the pause following the filler is so long that the clause containing the descriptive phrase substituting for the target was transcribed as a separate utterance, as indicated by the double slashes in the example). In addition, the pitch and the waveform intensity are very low (Figure 8). Without the nominal morphology this token would probably have been identified as a hesitative rather than as a placeholder.

(11) taji=gdə petux uŋun-du-j mi:je-du-j
DIST=CONTR cock.R FLR-DAT.ESS-PRFL.SG shoulder-DAT.ESS-PRFL.SG
hena-ja-n (700) uŋun-ma (2990) //
carry.on.back-NFUT-3SG FLR-ACC
mi:je-du-j hena-ja-n tco:ka-βa
shoulder-DAT.ESS-PRFL.SG carry.on.back-NFUT-3SG grass-ACC
hosi-ββi sələ-βa
cut(hair)-IMPERS iron-ACC

‘And that cock is carrying **whatchamacallit** on his whatchamacallit, on his shoulder. // On his shoulder he is carrying a scythe (lit. **an iron for cutting grass**).’

[TIN_hare_fox: 89-90; ID 856]

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8: Waveform and pitch contour of example (11)</figcaption></figure>

It was therefore not always possible to unambiguously assign bare tokens of the filler or those that end in a schwa to either the hesitative or the placeholder strategy.<fnref n="9" /> Such cases (50 in all) were coded as ‘indeterminate’.

<footnote n="9">⁹There is also one token of the filler (ID 486) that appears to be carrying the plural morpheme -l, which would partially mirror the morphology on a noun that might be the target. However, since the prosody was quite hesitative, and the speaker is APN whose enunciation is often rather indistinct, this was also coded as ‘indeterminate’.</footnote>
These data indicate that in Negidal there is no clear-cut distinction between the hesitative and placeholder strategy of the filler, but that it is rather a single form with a single function of delaying speech production until a word or phrase that is eluding the speaker has been found. This accounts for the frequent ambiguous prosodic patterns, where clear placeholders, i.e. *uŋun* carrying morphology and followed by an overt target, are pronounced with low pitch and intensity and are accompanied with markers of hesitation such as silent or filled pauses or repetitions, while clear hesitatives that are not at all syntactically integrated can be pronounced with utterance-level intensity and pitch and without any pauses or other marks of hesitation. A similar lack of distinction between the hesitative and placeholder strategies of fillers have been found for French *truc* and *machin* (Hennecke & Mihatsch 2022), for the Nasal fillers (Billings & McDonnell 2025 [this volume]), and the fillers found in Besemah, where it is “often impossible to decide whether a filler is employed as a hesitator or placeholder” (McDonnell & Billings 2025 [this volume]).

# 4 The filler *uŋun* in use

## 4.1 The characteristics of the filler

### 4.1.1 Frequency, form, and function

Overall in the Negidal corpus there are 882 examples of *uŋun* in ~76,000 Negidal words,<fnref n="10" /> i.e. ~11.6 occurrences of the filler per thousand words. This is of comparable frequency as that found for the Evenki filler *ani* (~12.6/1000 words, Klyachko 2022: 213) and the Tagalog interrogative *ano* ‘what’ with “placeholder” and “filler” functions (~9.4/1000 words, calculated from data found in Nagaya 2022: 94, 105), but considerably more frequent than the Mandarin demonstrative-derived fillers *nage* and *zhege* (~6.7/1000 words; Zhao & Jurafsky 2005) or various Russian placeholders (~4/1000 words; Podlesskaya & Kibrik 2009: 186).

About two-thirds of the occurrences of the filler carry morphology (Table 2), with roughly equal numbers of overt nominal morphology and verbal morphology. Thirty-two examples of the bare filler are syntactically in the Nominative case (labelled NOM in the table), which, as mentioned in §3, is unmarked; they

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Since the filler occurs practically exclusively in Negidal contexts and not in Russian code-switching (with two exceptions), I base my calculation on the (approximate) number of Negidal words.</footnote>
were kept separate from the unmarked tokens due to their distinct syntactic function. There is an overwhelming preponderance of inflectional morphology found on the filler, in contrast to derivational suffixes,<fnref n="11" /> which make up only about 3% of the morphologically marked occurrences of the filler.

<table><caption>Table 2: Types of morphology found on the filler (in per cent). Unclear tokens are excluded.</caption><tr><td>unmarked</td><td>30.4</td></tr><tr><td>NOM</td><td>3.6</td></tr><tr><td>nominal</td><td>32.4</td></tr><tr><td>verbal</td><td>33.5</td></tr></table>

The filler mostly functions as a placeholder, with 71% of the 858 tokens for which a strategy was identified being assigned to this category, and only 23% being definable as hesitatives; approximately 6% are indeterminate. This differs from the filler use of Amazonian Spanish *este*, where the hesitative strategy is nearly twice as frequent as the placeholder strategy (Vallejos Yopán 2023: 665). The proportions of placeholders carrying nominal and verbal morphology are roughly equal, accounting for ~45% and ~48% of the placeholder tokens, respectively. Not all of the placeholders are followed by their target: ~30% of the nominal placeholders and a surprising 50% of the verbal placeholders lack an overt target. This is similar to what Billings & McDonnell 2025 [this volume] find for the placeholder in the Austronesian language Nasal.

### 4.1.2 Position

The filler occurs mostly in medial position in the utterance (approximately 77% of hesitatives and 83% of placeholders), with hardly any occurrences in initial position or by themselves (Figure 9). In initial position there are twice as many hesitatives as placeholders (5% vs. 2.3%, respectively), which might be an indication that at the beginning of an utterance speakers are still planning the overall thrust of their utterance rather than searching for a particular lexeme.

<footnote n="11">¹¹Five tokens of nominally used *uŋun* carry the Similative suffix -gatcin, and one each carry the Decessive, Limitative, Proprietive, and Privative suffix, while four tokens each of verbally used *uŋun* carry the markers of Habitual and Inchoative aspect, and one carries the Refactive suffix -dgi, which expresses a meaning of 'do again' or 'go back'.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9: Position of the filler in the utterance. Unclear and indeterminate examples are excluded.</figcaption></figure>

In the overwhelming majority of instances (~80%) when the placeholder is re-
paired, the target follows immediately after the filler, although some material can
intervene. This can occasionally be an explicit word search, leading to quite long
distances between the placeholder and its target. The intervening material can
be recycled material (e.g. the numeral ‘one’ in (12)), a prompt by an interlocutor
(see (48) in §5.1 and (58) in §5.4), or other parts of the placeholder phrase or the
clause (13).

(12) əmən (0) **uŋun-ma** (550) əmən gibtca:n-ma βa:-tca:-n gun-ə-n...
one FLR-ACC one roe.deer-ACC kill-PST-3SG say-NFUT-3SG
‘He killed a **whatchamacallit**, a **deer**, he said, ...’ [APN_grindstone: 93; ID 392]

(13) babufka smotri taj taj gun-ə-m bi (620) uŋunə-l (0)
granny.R look.IMP.R DIST DIST say-NFUT-1SG 1SG FLR-PL
bi-si itce-kəl kresti-l
COP-NFUT[3PL] see-IMP.SG cross.S-R-PL
‘“Granny, look there”, I say, “there are **whatchamacallits**, look, **crosses!**”'
[APN_cheremsha_brodjaga: 32; ID 300]

4.1.3 Mirroring on placeholders and recycling with targets

Nearly 75% of the placeholders with an overtly expressed target fully mirror the
morphology of the target, with slightly more nominal placeholders (77%) mir-
roring the target morphology fully as compared to verbal placeholders (72%).
These proportions of full mirroring are considerably higher than those found
in the polysynthetic Australian language Dalabon, where only 30-50% of nomi-
nal placeholders and 5-10% of verbal placeholders fully mirror the morphology of
the target (Ponsonnet 2025 [this volume]). As can be seen in Figure 10,<fnref n="12" /> the pro-
portion of placeholders carrying only partially mirrored verbal morphology is
twice as high as that with partially mirrored nominal morphology (24% vs. 12%).
In Evenki, too, verbal placeholders show a higher proportion of partial mirror-
ing than nominal placeholders (Klyachko 2022: 211). As suggested by Françoise
Rose and an anonymous reviewer, this higher frequency of partial mirroring with
verbal placeholders might be linked to the fact that there are more verbal deriva-
tional suffixes than nominal ones, and it is the derivational suffixes that tend to
be omitted from the placeholder, as detailed below.

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Figure 10: Mirroring of target morphology on placeholders that stand in for nouns and NPs (PH-n) and verbs and VPs (PH-v) in per cent of occurrences with targets carrying “mirrorable” morphology. Instances where there is no overt target or where the placeholder and target are in Nominative case (which in Negidal is unmarked) were excluded.</figcaption></figure>

The verbal placeholder does not carry any valency-changing morphology,
such as the Causative suffix -βkan or the suffix -β that can change a transitive
verb into an intransitive one (14) and an intransitive verb into a transitive one (cf.

<footnote n="12">¹²The label “partial” designates instances when the PH carries less morphology than the target and “exceeds” refers to instances when it carries more morphology than the target. The code “mismatch” was used for instances in which both PH and target carry morphology, but this is not the same (this can include occurrences where there is also a mismatch in the number of morphemes), while “bare PH” designates unmarked *unun* standing in for a target that carries morphology.</footnote>
Aralova & Pakendorf 2022: 29–31), even when the target carries such morphology. This indicates that in its verbal reading *uŋun* functions as an ambitransitive verb (cf. §4.1.5).

(14) **ta-du** əmən se:ni-n (2350) **uŋun-ə-n** (0)
DIST-DAT.ESS one ear-3SG FLR-NFUT-3SG
**loku-tce-β-βə-n** ge:-n se:n-βa-n (860) **uŋun-tca:-l**
hang.up-RES-VAL-NFUT-3SG other-3SG ear-ACC-3SG FLR-PST-PL
(3660) **do:-ski** i:-βkan-tca:-l
inside-ADVB.All enter-CAUS-PST-PL

‘Then one ear (of the hat) **whatchamacallits**, hangs, and they **did** whatchamacallit, they tucked the other one up inside.’

[GIK_olan: 7; ID 769-770]

It is generally inflectional morphology that is mirrored: non-finite converb suffixes and the Negative Converb (15), or finite tense<fnref n="13" /> and subject markers for verbal placeholders, and case (16), possessive, or number marking for nominal placeholders.

(15) **taj** digi-la-βa (0) **uŋun-mi** (1310) **nupki-mi**
DIST four-NUM(DAYS)-ACC FLR-SS.COND to.smoke[TR]-SS.COND
**ela-la-βa** **nupki-mi** **o-ŋati-nen** **e:ma=da**
three-NUM(DAYS)-ACC to.smoke[TR]-SS.COND NEG-DEONT-3SG which=ADD
**dilkan** (680) **uŋun-a** (590) **do:-ja** **olo-du**
fly FLR-NEG.CVB to.land-NEG.CVB fish-DAT.ESS

‘If you **whatchamacallit**, if you smoke it for four days, if you smoke it for three days, not a single fly will **whatchamacallit**, will land on the fish.’

[DIN_jukola: 97; ID 618-619]

(16) **e:da** si bi (0) **uŋun-mə-β** (740) **jebga:-βə-β** **jep-tca:-s**
why 2SG 1SG FLR-ACC-1SG food.EVK-ACC-1SG eat-PST-2SG
‘Why did you eat **my whatchamacallit**, **my food**?’ [APK_fox: 153; ID 193]

In partial mirroring it is by and large derivational morphology that is omitted, such as the Multiplicative (17) or the Resultative ((14) above) missing from verbal placeholders, or the Diminutive suffix (18) that is omitted from nominal

<footnote n="13">¹³Note that I counted two examples where the placeholder carried the Future suffix -ja and the target carried the suffix -jina as being fully mirrored, since these Future suffixes seem to occur in free variation in Negidal.</footnote>
placeholders. Only four examples of verbal placeholders involve mirroring of aspectual morphemes, out of a total of 26 examples where the target carries such a suffix; no other derivational morphology (such as the Associated Motion suffix or the Multiplicative or Semelfactive) was found on the filler, and none of the seven evaluative morphemes found on overt nominal targets was mirrored on the placeholder. This is again similar to Evenki, where derivational morphology is omitted from the verbal placeholder (Klyachko 2022: 211). Thus, the placeholder carries the inflectional morphology that is needed for syntactic integration, while morphemes that do not play a syntactic role, such as evaluatives or aspectual markers, are omitted. The filler can therefore be said to be substituting for the stem rather than the root of the target.

(17) a taj doldi-tca:ki-nin taj bəjə oj uŋun-ma bipag-ga and.R DIST hear-REM.PST-3SG DIST person PROX FLR-ACC settlement-ACC hul-nakan (0) uŋunə-ji-βa-n (180) pəktəru-ktə-ji-βa-n go-SS.SIM FLR-PRS.PTCP-ACC-3SG shoot-MULT-PRS.PTCP-ACC-3SG ŋa:lə-l-tca to.fear-INCH-PST[3SG]

‘And he heard that the man walking through the whatchamacallit, the village **is doing whatchamacallit**, is **shooting around**, he got frightened.’

[DIN_rok: 46; ID 685]

(18) jaβa-ja-n (1580) uŋun-ma (360) kala-ka-tcan-ma... grab-NFUT-3SG FLR-ACC pot.EVK-DIM-DIM-ACC

‘He takes **a whatchamacallit**, a **little pot**...’

[AET_bear: 27; ID 5]

Recycling denotes the repetition of material that precedes the placeholder with the target (Podlesskaya 2010: 23–25). This is quite rare in the Negidal corpus: only in about one-fifth of the examples with recyclable material in the placeholder phrase is this repeated with the target. In particular, adjuncts, direct objects, nominal modifiers (47), demonstratives (24), and the negative auxiliary (15) tend not to be recycled with the target. In contrast, verbs governing direct objects can be omitted or recycled with equal frequency; thus, in (19) the verb *essaβun* ‘we reach’ is not repeated with the target, whereas in (20) the verb *issen* ‘he plucks’ is recycled. In some instances there is recycling, but with a change in form, such as a Proximal Demonstrative being changed to a Distal Demonstrative. In the examples, the curly brackets frame the placeholder phrases containing recyclable and recycled material, where present.
(19) **ti=tti** {es-sa-bu̱n **be...** (0) **uŋun-ma} (0) **mugdin-ma**
like this=PTL reach-NFUT-1PL.EX FS FLR-ACC riverbank-ACC
‘Like this we reached **whatchamacallit**, *the bank*.’ [DIN_zabludilisj: 26; ID 720]

(20) **təpu-kə-la:-jə-n** **tceβkan** **tik-kə-n** gə
knock.out-?SUDDEN-SMLF-NFUT-3SG bird(small) fall-NFUT-3SG DP
{is-se-n (820) **uŋun-ma-n} (1020) {is-se-n
pluck-NFUT-3SG FLR-ACC-3SG pluck-NFUT-3SG
**ləpultə-βa-n]}
feathers-ACC-3SG
‘He knocked [it] out, Chevkan fell down, he plucks **whatchamacallit**, he
plucks *the feathers*.’
[APN_skazkaPtica: 22; ID 457]

4.1.4 The filler as a nominal placeholder

As a nominal placeholder, *uŋun* can substitute for proper (21), higher animate (22), lower animate (23), and inanimate nouns (24).

(21) **oj=da** (160) **uŋun-ŋasa** (0) **ba:tur-ka-ŋasa=da**
PROX=ADD FLR-DEC PN-DIM-DEC=ADD
əmə-β-βat(-tce-n)
come-VAL-HAB-NFUT-3SG
‘And this one too, **late what’s-his-name**, *late Batur*, he used to bring.’
[APN_DIN_conversation: 39; ID 318]

(22) **taj** **boa baja-sal** **bipagi-tin** **boagda-du-n**
DIST FS rich-PL.HUM settlement-3PL yard-DAT.ESS-3SG
**itce-t-tce-n** **itce-je-n** (1050) **uŋun-ma** (1330) **olgin-ma**
see-TAM2-NFUT-3SG see-NFUT-3SG FLR-ACC pig-ACC
‘In the settlement of those rich people he saw a **whatchamacallit**, a **pig** in the yard.’
[TIN_swine: 61; ID 879]

(23) gə taj kuhi-rə (0) taj uŋu-l-ji (610) taj
DP DIST to.fight.EVK-NFUT.EVK[3PL] DIST FLR-PL-INS DIST
**dilka-l-ji** fly-PL-INS
‘So they are fighting with **those whatchamacallits**, *those flies*.’
[APN_koldekan: 94; ID 429]
(24) nu **twindaka:-tan** taj (0) uŋun-duli-n (570)
PTL.R little.bird-DIM DIST FLR-PROL-3SG
so:na-li-tin i:-je-n=da tadu
smoke.hole.EVK-PROL-3PL enter-NFUT-3SG=ADD there

‘Well, the bird (entered) via **whatchamacallit**, it entered there **via the**
**smoke hole.**’

[APK_1chindakan: 81-82; ID 154]

The filler can also stand in for different types of NPs (cf. Schegloff 1979: 263; this is also found in the Tungusic language Even (Matić 2008) and in the Nakh-Daghestanian languages Udi and Aghul (Ganenkov et al. 2010: 101)): attributive, conjoined (25), possessive, and NPs with a relational noun functioning as a post-position (26). The attributive NPs can be quite elaborate and include relative clauses, which in Negidal are participial (27).

(25) je taj hətəka:si-l-tca:-du-n taj uj
INTERJ DIST jump[ITER]-INCH-PST.PTCP-DAT.ESS-3SG DIST recently
geda-tca:ki-nin (0) uŋun (0) tceβka:-tca-l siŋəjə-tca-l je
shove.into-REM.PTCP-3SG FLR bird-DIM-PL mouse-DIM-PL INTERJ
uŋun-duki-n təttcanŋa-duki-n hətəkən-ə
FLR-ABL-3SG clothing-ABL-3SG jump[SMLF]-NFUT[3PL]

‘When he started jumping, those **whatchamacallit**, little birds and mice, which he had hidden, jumped out of whatchamacallit, out of his clothes.’

[APK_fox: 140; ID 184]

(26) goja-βa tigdə-ηəsə-n tukti-tca: (0) uŋun-tiki (0)
distance-ACC rain-VS.SIM-3SG ascend-PST[3SG] FLR-ALL
koridor-βi ugi-da-tki-n
lean.to.R-PRFL.SG top-SIDE-ALL-3SG

‘When it rained for a long time he climbed up **to whatchamacallit**, on top of his lean-to.’

[APN_DIN weather: 18; ID 371]

(27) noŋan sinə-βə gunə gun-ə-n taj (0) uŋun-ma (3030)
3SG 2SG.OBL-ACC FS say-NFUT-3SG DIST FLR-ACC
vorona-βa atikaŋi-n noda-tca-βa aja-ma-t
crow.R-ACC wife-3SG throw-PST.PTCP-ACC good-INTS-ADVR
ulgu tca:n-da-s
tell-VS.PURP-2SG

‘She is asking you to tell nicely **about whatchamacallit** about the crow whose wife left him.’

[APN_birds: 98; ID 293]
It can also substitute for adjectives in predicative position (28); however, only
two such examples occur in the corpus. Note that the Evenki filler *aŋi/aŋə* can
also stand in for predicative adjectives, as shown by an example provided by
Klyachko (2022: 207, her ex. (12)).

(28) *noŋan bi-tca-n* so (0) *uŋun* (340) *ujimkun* i mu:-du
3SG COP-PST-3SG very FLR light and.R water-DAT.ESS
*jaβu-tca-ja-n*
take-RES-NFUT-3SG

‘It was very **whatchamacallit**, *light* and floated upon the water.’

[AVK_crossing_stream: 105; ID 492]

The target is often provided subsequently (see for instance (25)-(28)), but this
need not be the case – as mentioned in §4.1.1, the target is left unspecified in
nearly 30% of the examples with a nominal placeholder. Such omission frequently
occurs because the target is obvious from the speech situation, as in (29) taken
from a procedural text about hide preparation: this was uttered at the moment
when the speaker turned to pick up a particular tool. Occasionally, the target is
described with a clause, such as the headless relative clause in (30). Note that
in this example the speaker finally resorts to using the Russian lexeme that she
seems to have wanted to avoid, since she cannot come up with a Negidal equiva-
lent. There is no indication that *uŋun* can have a vague, generic meaning rather
than standing in for a particular noun or noun phrase that is eluding the speaker.

(29) *jaβa-m* ge: (590) *uŋun-ma* (590)
take[NFUT]-1SG other FLR-ACC

‘Then I take the next **whatchamacallit** (instrument).’

[DIN_preparing_hidden: 157; ID 661]

(30) *ulguma-ja-n* min-du *na:-ʃə-m* *taj* əŋun... (0) *uŋun-mi*
ask-NFUT-3SG 1SG.OBL-DAT.ESS put-Q.FUT-1SG DIST FS FLR-PRFL.SG
*do:-du-n* (570) *taj* *olo-ŋi-n* *na:-ktci-ji-n*
inside-DAT.ESS-3SG DIST fish-POSS-3SG put-DUR-PRS.PTCP-3SG

*do:-du-n* (830) *uŋun-du-j* (470) *kul-du-j*
inside-DAT.ESS-3SG FLR-DAT.ESS-PRFL.SG sack-DAT.ESS-PRFL.SG

‘She asks me whether to put it **into the whatchamacallit** (lit. She asks me “should I put it into my whatchamacallit”), into that where she puts the fish, in the whatchamacallit, in the sack.’

[GIK_shuka: 38-39; ID 787-788]
There are furthermore three examples in which the filler appears to be standing in for direct speech (31), as shown by prosody and the fact that in two examples the fillers were translated as speech complements,<fnref n="14" /> indicating that our consultant interpreted them as holding the place for direct speech utterances. Furthermore, *uŋun* is marked with the Accusative case expected for the complement of the speech verb in example (31). Unfortunately, two of these examples come from one of the old digitized tape recordings, so that the extraction of the pitch contour in Praat is full of errors. Nevertheless, a rise in pitch on the first syllable can clearly be identified in Praat (Figure 11); this differs from the prosody of hesitative uses of *uŋun*, justifying the interpretation that *uŋun* has a placeholder function here.

(31) minə-βə gun-tса-n (820) **uŋun-ma** (1570) *katcikan-ma-s* bi
1SG.OBL-ACC say-PST-3SG FLR-ACC puppy-ACC-2SG 1SG
jepu-βka-ŋta...
eat-CAUS-HORT.SG

‘It said **this** to me: “Let me feed your puppy,...”

[APK_1chindakan: 62-63; ID 153]

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Figure 11: Waveform and pitch contour of example (31)</figcaption></figure>

Such uses of the filler are also attested in Evenki, but Klyachko (2022: 207) analyses them as instances of hesitative uses rather than as placeholder.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴I reflect this in the translation of (31) by exceptionally not translating the placeholder as ‘whatchamacallit’.</footnote>
### 4.1.5 The filler as verbal placeholder

As a verbal placeholder, *uŋun* can stand in for both intransitive (32) and transitive (33) verbs without taking any additional valency-changing morphology, similar to the Manambu placeholder verb *məgi-* (Aikhenvald 2008: 399–400, 575). This implies that *uŋun* can be analysed as an ambitransitive verb – which explains the lack of valency-changing morphology on the filler even when the target carries such morphology, as mentioned above (§4.1.3). The filler can also stand in for a VP (see the coding definitions for details on how these were identified), substituting for the verb plus adjunct (8, 14) or direct object.

(32) **atika:-sal** gə təgə-dgi-ja:n (890) **uŋu-l-tca:-l** (0)
old.woman-PL.HUM DP sit.down-REP-SS.ANT FLR-INCH-PST-PL
**məjga:-l-tca:-l** gun-ə
think-INCH-PST-PL say-NFUT[3PL]

‘The old women, having sat down, started to whatchamacallit, started to think, they say…’

[GIK_olan: 23; ID 768]

(33) **tadukin aja** ajag ajanis-sa:n **opuška-ja-n** (0)
then good FS adjust.properly-SS.ANT trimming.R-DEST-3SG
**uŋun-ə-s** (280) **tulə-s**
FLR-NFUT-2SG attach[NFUT]-2SG

‘Then, having adjusted (the centre) properly **you** whatchamacallit, **you** add the trimming.’

[DIN_duck痒: 75; ID 577]

However, even though as a verb *uŋun* is mostly used as a placeholder (e.g. (6), (14), (15), (17) above), both with and without an overt target, there are also several instances where it functions as a generic action verb.<fnref n="15" /> These uses probably account in part for the very high frequency (50%) of verbally used *uŋun* without an overt target (§4.1.1). It can refer to a general, unspecified action (‘do’), as in (34), which is taken from a narrative about a game in which the loser has to fulfill the wish of the winner. Here, the loser is asking the winner what it is he should do for her, i.e. the reference is clearly to an as yet unspecified action. The filler can also be used deictically (mostly accompanied by the manner demonstrative *ti*: ‘like this’), referring anaphorically to what was said in the preceding discourse (35) or exophorically to what is being done in the speech situation (36).<fnref n="16" /> Such examples

<footnote n="15">¹⁵In §4.1.1 to §4.1.3 all tokens of *uŋun* carrying verbal morphology were included in the counts for verbal placeholder.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶I refrain from adding pause lengths to this example, since the pauses were the result of the demonstration and are hence not indicative of any form of disfluency.</footnote>
with exophoric meaning are mostly found in the procedural texts, and in the ac-
companying video one can see that the filler is accompanied by the appropriate
action (Figure 12).

(34) gə e:kun-ma (0) uŋun-ŋati-β (0) gun-ə-n
DP what-ACC FLR-DEONT-1SG say-NFUT-3SG
“Well, what **shall I do** (for you)?”, he says.
[DINgames: 34; ID 594]

(35) a osi ti-kan (0) o-ta-s uŋun-a
and.R now like(this-DIM NEG-NEG.FUT-2SG FLR-NEG.CVB
{In the past we fished as much as [we needed]. There was a little house
like that up high [on piles] and there we put the dried fish so that it
would last all year for us and for our dogs.} ‘But now you can’t do like
that.’
[AETvillage_life: 90; ID 135]

(36) sa-:ŋati-s olgo-tca-βa-n ti:
know-DEONT-2SG dry.out[INTR]-PST.PTCP-ACC-3SG like>this
**uŋun-e-ki-s** ti: **uŋun-gi-je-ki-s**
FLR-NFUT-COND-2SG like>this FLR-REP-NFUT-COND-2SG
o-:ŋati-nin nəptə-mdi
become-DEONT-3SG smooth-INTS.ADJ
‘You will know that it’s dry if, when **you do like this** and **when you do it**
**again**, it straightens out.’
[DIN_preparing_hidden: 185; ID 662-663]

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>ti: uŋunekis</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>ti: uŋungijekis</figcaption></figure>

<caption>Figure 12: Two still frames taken from the video that illustrate the rolling up and unrolling gestures that accompany the tokens of uŋun in example (36)</caption>
Example (36) is taken from a recording in which the speaker explained and demonstrated how the Negidals prepare elk hide. Here, she shows how you can judge whether you have scraped off all the moisture by rolling it up ('when you do like this') and then unrolling it again ('you do it again' – with the refactive suffix -(d)gi).

There are also examples in which *uŋun* is used not as a placeholder for a target that eludes the speaker nor with anaphoric reference, but to substitute for a verb that was used in the immediately preceding context (37).<fnref n="17" /> Such uses of the filler have also been identified for Northern Pastaza Kichwa, where Rice 2025 [this volume] terms them ‘resumptive pro-verbs’. The function of such resumptive uses of the filler is unclear, but it is unlikely to be a problem with the planning or execution of speech. Nor is it likely to be the avoidance of repetition of the lexical verb, as shown by the fact that the sentence following (37) contains three tokens of the verb ‘eat”.

(37) **taj bəjun ti: jepu-βki, jaja ti: ə-βki**
DIST elk like>this eat-HAB.PTCP bear[EUPH] like>this NEG-HAB.PTCP
**uŋun-a**
FLR-NEG.CVB

‘An elk *eats like this*, but not a bear. (Lit. An elk *eats like this*, a bear *doesn’t do*). {Why would a bear eat a tree? A bear *eats berries*, it *eats nuts*.’}

[APN_DIN_galigda: 210; ID 345]

In the verbal uses in which it does not function as a placeholder, *uŋun* partly overlaps with the generic action verb *peko-‘do’*. Next to its use to refer to unspecified actions (38), sometimes with anaphoric (39) or exophoric reference, *peko-* is used as a light verb with ideophones (40).

(38) **e:kun-ma peko-ŋa:ti-s**
what-ACC do-DEONT-2SG

‘What are **you going to do**?’

[GIK_1belekakta: 1]

(39) **ti: peko-ja:n mani-n ju:-ja-n ηənə-jə-n**
like>this do-SS.ANT self-3SG exit-NFUT-3SG go-NFUT-3SG

‘Having **done this** he himself exits and leaves.’

[DIN_girl_devil: 77]

<footnote n="17">¹⁷This is an example without a sound file, hence the pause duration cannot be established.</footnote>
(40) ... *araj* taj-du-n *uŋun-du-n* həjə-du-n
... RESTR.EVK DIST-DAT.ESS-3SG FLR-DAT.ESS-3SG bottom-DAT.ESS-3SG
*e:kun=ka* **kope:r kope:r peko-jə-n**
what=FOC IDEO IDEO do-NFUT-3SG

‘... only something at the bottom [of the sack] is rattling (lit. does **koper-koper**).’

[APK_fox: 107]

The generic action verb *peko-* is furthermore frequently used as an auxiliary in
analytical constructions with a prospective reading, that is, in constructions with
a reading of imminence, often with a nuance of intention or desire (see Matić 2017
for a description of this construction in Negidal’s sister Even). This construction
consists of the lexical verb in the Reflexive-marked Purposive Converb form -da-j
(SG) or -da-βaj (PL) with *peko-* acting as auxiliary (41). There are three examples in
the corpus where *uŋun* takes the place of the auxiliary *peko-* in such prospective
constructions, e.g. (42), but no examples where *uŋun* functions as a light verb
with ideophones.

(41) *itce-t-tce* siβu-ŋi-tin ələ **təgə-da-j**
see-TAM2-NFUT[3PL] sun-POSS-3PL already sit.down-VS.PURP-PRFL.SG
**peko-l-tca:**
do-INCH-PST[3SG]

‘They look: the sun is about to go down. (lit. is about to sit down)’

[GIK_kljukva: 16]

(42) **puktəran-da-j** ələ (0) **uŋun-tca-n**, (0) ...
shoot-VS.PURP-PRFL.SG already FLR-PST-3SG

‘He was already **about to shoot**...’

[AET_bear: 20; ID 4]

However, while the filler overlaps partly with *peko-* in its use as a generic verb, *uŋun* is the only verbal placeholder: there are no examples in the corpus in which *peko-* substitutes for another verb.

In three examples in the corpus, which were all uttered by the same speaker,
the filler seems to be substituting not for a verb (phrase), but for an independent
clause. In two examples, one of which is shown here (43), it is a 3PL Non-Future
tense-marked filler that refers to the following clause, as shown by the prosody,
which is clearly that of a syntactically integrated verb and not a hesitative (Fig-
ure 13), and the translation provided by our consultant, which included the filler.
(43) gə taj bi-je-mne:n (0) uŋun-ə (860)
DP DIST live-DUR-SS.DUR FLR-NFUT[3PL]
əma:tcin-a-βaj o:-na:-tca-l di:-ski
birchbark.boat-DEST-PRFL.PL make-AM-PST-PL taiga-ADVB.All

‘Well, living like that **they do something**, **they** went to the forest to make
**a** boat for **themselves**.’

[APN_two_sisters: 4-5; ID 485]

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Figure 13: Waveform and pitch contour of example (43)</figcaption></figure>

In these examples, *uŋun* is translated with ‘do (something)’ (что-то делают), similar to its use with anaphoric or exophoric reference, but here the reference is cataphoric, to an event that has not yet been mentioned by the speaker. Whether this has a particular discourse function or is merely a means to gain time to gather one’s thoughts cannot be judged given the small number of examples.

In the third example (44), the filler is unmarked, yet prosodically it can be identified as a placeholder, since its pitch does not drop down to the level often found for hesitives (Figure 14). Furthermore, it was translated as the complement of ‘see’ by our consultant. The substituted clause is finite and thus grammatically not a complement clause (which in Negidal would take an Accusative-marked participial predicate), but the context makes it clear that what the speaker sees is the boat coming.

(44) itce-je-bun (0) uŋun (0) əmən onotco-kan əmə-jə-n
see-NFUT-1PL.EX FLR one boat.EVK-DIM COME-NFUT-3SG
‘{We went there. Going we saw.} We saw **something**, a boat is coming.’

[APN_anecdotes: 16; ID 275]
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>Figure 14: Waveform and pitch contour of example (44)</figcaption></figure>

To summarize what was said in §4.1, the Negidal filler *uŋun* occurs with high frequency in spoken discourse, with the placeholder strategy dominating over the hesitative strategy; however, targets are frequently left unexpressed. It takes the place of nouns and verbs with equal frequency and thus goes against the cross-linguistic tendency for placeholders to occur more commonly with nominal than with verbal targets (Podlesskaya 2010: 13). While the filler carrying verbal morphology often has a reading of a generic action verb, *uŋun* used as a noun does not seem to have any vague or generic meaning. In addition to substituting for nouns and verbs the filler can also stand in for clauses and direct speech, although this is very rare in the data and restricted to the two speakers who were born before 1925. This is not the only inter-speaker difference in use of the filler, as will be addressed in the following section.

## 4.2 Differences in use of *uŋun* between speakers

As can be seen in Figure 15, the frequency of the filler varies considerably across speakers. Such inter-speaker variability has also been found for markers of disfluency in German women (Braun et al. 2023), and for the use of placeholders in Kalamang (Visser 2025 [this volume]) and Besemah (McDonnell & Billings 2025 [this volume]) spoken in Indonesia, Kolyma Yukaghir spoken in Siberia (Ventayol-Boada 2025 [this volume]), and among three speakers of the endangered Australian language Dalabon (Ponsonnet 2025 [this volume]).

Interestingly, there is no linear correlation with the proficiency of the speakers (Figure 15). It is likely that the two speakers who use the filler most, namely
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Figure 15: Frequency of use of *uŋun* by speaker, normalized to 1000 words. Speaker ID's are arranged in order of increasing proficiency, and the absolute number of *uŋun* they produced is indicated in brackets. The dashed line indicates the corpus average (11.6 per thousand words).</figcaption></figure>

AVK and AET, do so because they are relatively weak and insecure speakers (Pakendorf & Aralova 2018). The influence of language proficiency on the rate of filler use has also been demonstrated for Evenki (Klyachko 2022: 213–214) and been observed for filled pauses in general (Kosmala & Crible 2022: 220). In this context it is a bit surprising that the two weakest speakers, GIKlju and LIO, produce hardly any *uŋun*. However, for her own contribution to the corpus GIKlju only read a prepared text, which not unsurprisingly contains no fillers; the one filler she did produce was while trying to ask AVK a question in Negidal during the recording of the latter's narrative. With respect to LIO, it might be that she was actually more proficient in Negidal than the few very hesitant narratives recorded with her led us to believe – this is indicated by a fluent spontaneous interaction with her mother which was recorded when she served as an interlocutor. Rather harder to explain is the relatively high frequency of use of the filler by the only male speaker, APK, who is said to have had an “excellent knowledge of the language” (Khasanova & Pevnov 2003: 227, my translation). Possibly his above-average use of the filler is due to a certain pressure to narrate folktales in a specific way using particular terms and phrases (Khasanova & Pevnov 2003: 233–234). This might have induced him to hesitate frequently (see Figure 17 below) while he remembered necessary details.

An alternative explanation for the inter-speaker variability in frequency of filler use, suggested by an anonymous reviewer, is the impact of differences in
Negidal practice among different speakers. Since Negidal is hardly used in every-
day life anymore, the speakers who contributed to the corpus would have gained
fluency over the period they worked with the recording linguists. Speakers who
did not contribute much text would have remained relatively rusty in Negidal,
and hence resorted to the filler a lot while searching for forgotten words, while
speakers who produced more recordings would have acquired practice speaking
it for the linguists and hence produced less fillers overall. However, a breakdown
of the frequency of filler use by year for the three speakers (APN, DIN, and GIK)
for which the corpus contains recordings made over several years (Figure 16)
does not show the linear decrease over time that would be expected if language
practice were the only factor at play. It is true that there is a drastic drop in oc-
currence of the filler in GIK's production between 2005 and 2006, which might
indicate some form of habituation. However, based on my own work with GIK,
I think it is more likely diffidence rather than rustiness that made her hesitate,
with the drop in filler use in later years being due to her increasing familiarity
with the recording linguists.

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Figure 16: Frequency of filler use (per 1000 words) by year of recording for the speakers APN, DIN, and GIK. These are the only speakers for whom the corpus contains recordings made over several years as documented by metadata.</figcaption></figure>

Speakers do not only differ in the frequency with which they use fillers, but
also in their choice of hesitatives vs. placeholders (cf. Visser 2025 [this volume]
for a similar finding for the Papuan language Kalamang, albeit taking into ac-
count also the hesitative ‘uh(m)’, which is excluded in my study). DIN makes
very little use of *uŋun* as a hesitative, with only 10% of her tokens falling into
this category (Figure 17); this contrasts strikingly with AET, nearly half of whose
tokens of the filler (46%) are hesitatives.

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Figure 17: Proportion (in per cent) of hesitative use of filler tokens pro-
duced by individual speakers, arranged by increasing frequency of hesi-
tatives. Unclear and indeterminate tokens were excluded from the total
count. Since GIKlju and LIO produced hardly any fillers, they are omit-
ted from the figure.</figcaption></figure>

This difference – which results in a difference between fluent vs. hesitant
speech – can probably be partly explained by differences in language proficiency,
since DIN, GIK, and APN are relatively proficient speakers, while AET is one of
the speakers with the least active use of Negidal and hence lacks proficiency.
In addition, the pressure to produce narratives in a particular way and to speak
“proper” Negidal might also have an impact on the amount of hesitative vs. place-
holder uses of the filler. Thus, as mentioned above, the fact that APK, a proficient
speaker, uses the filler as a hesitative rather than placeholder in 35% of his tokens
might be due to the pressure to narrate fairy tales in a precise way following par-
ticular conventions. This could have increased his hesitancy without increasing
the need to search for lexemes. Similar pressures can explain the relatively high
frequency of hesitative uses for TIN (33%) and AVK (30%): as mentioned in §2,
the former recorded little narratives for use as Negidal lessons to be broadcast
over the local radio, which would have increased the pressure to use only Negidal
words. As to AVK, she was very self-conscious and tried hard to speak “correct”
and “pure” Negidal in her contribution to the archive – to such an extent that she
discarded a first recording of her narrative, which she deemed too disfluent, and
asked to be recorded again in the presence of a Negidal interlocutor (GIKlju). In
contrast, the recordings involving DIN and APN, in particular, were often very
informal and even include conversations at the tea table, which would have low-
ered the pressure to produce “proper” Negidal; hence, they use the filler mostly
when searching for particular words or in its function as a generic verb.

Furthermore, DIN stands out with an extremely high frequency of verbal place-
holders, twice as high as her use of nominal placeholders (Figure 18). This might
be due to the fact that she produced several procedural texts, in which *uŋun-* is
frequently used anaphorically and exophorically, as discussed in §4.1.5. DIN’s
sister GIK, too, produces the verbal placeholder relatively frequently, in contrast
to APK, TIN, and APN, in whose productions it is the nominal placeholder that
predominates.

<figure><img src="image_24.png" /><figcaption>Figure 18: Frequency of strategies of use of *uŋun* by individual speakers (arranged in order of increasing proficiency), excluding unclear and indeterminate tokens as well as those that stand in for adjectives, clauses, and direct speech. Since GIKlju and LIO produced hardly any fillers, they are omitted from the figure.</figcaption></figure>

It is notable that with the exception of AVK all the speakers omit the target
more often for verbal placeholders than for nominal placeholders (Figure 19). As
suggested by Françoise Rose, this could be due to the fact that the verbal place-
holder has a generic meaning of ‘do’ (cf. §4.1.5), while the nominal placeholder
lacks a similar generic meaning (§4.1.4). This is particularly noticeable for APN,
who omits the target in over 70% of her uses of *uŋun-* as a verbal placeholder,
leaving it up to the hearer to reconstruct the meaning. APN also omits nominal
targets very frequently (nearly 40% of all her tokens of the filler standing in for
a noun or NP lack an overt target). Possibly her advanced age – she was in her early nineties when she was recorded – made her unwilling to expend the effort needed to search for words that eluded her.

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>Figure 19: Proportion of placeholder uses without overt targets across speakers. GIKIju and LIO are omitted, since the extremely small number of fillers that they produced precludes meaningful analysis.</figcaption></figure>

To summarize, speakers resort to using the filler with very variable frequency, and they also vary in the frequency with which they use it as a placeholder or hesitative. The choices seem to be governed by proficiency of the speakers as well as by the genre and recording context. Less proficient speakers use the filler more frequently, and in particular as a hesitative rather than as a placeholder; similarly, the pressure to narrate folk tales in a particular manner produces many fillers, especially hesitatives. In contrast, procedural texts trigger the use of targetless verbal placeholders with a generic reading.

# 5 Cognitive and pragmatic aspects of filler use

## 5.1 Fillers in word search

As mentioned in the introduction, fillers are one of the strategies speakers can use to play for time when they encounter difficulties in retrieving a lexical item. This is demonstrated particularly clearly by examples where the word search is subsequently verbalized (45), but also by instances where a placeholder is broken off when the speaker remembers the target (46):
(45) na:ndun man mo:-ŋi-n bi-si-n taj (0) uŋun (1450) uŋun
3SG.DAT.ESS self tree-POSS-3SG COP-NFUT-3SG DIST FLR FLR
(1890) bəjə mo:-ŋi-nen taj... listvennica omŋo-tса bi-si-m
man tree-POSS-3SG DIST larch.R forget-PST.PTCP AUX-NFUT-3SG
‘He has his own tree [i.e. for men there is a separate tree on which to
perform the holgin ritual], that **whatchamacallit/uhm...**
**whatchamacallit/uhm...** A man’s tree is.... I forgot (how to say) larch
[using the Russian word for ‘larch’].’ [GIK_ostroe 20-22; ID 776-777]

(46) taj=tti bu feli-βa (1000) uŋun-e-β... (0)
DIST=PTL1 1PL.EX taimen-ACC FLR-NFUT-1
olo-ma-t-tce-βun
fish-VR-TAM2-NFUT-1PL.EX
‘Like that we **whatchamacall...**, caught a taimen!’ [DIN_rybalka: 27; ID 691]

Very often, when the delayed constituent is finally produced, it carries a higher pitch which emphasises it (cf. Podlesskaya & Korotaev 2022: 71–73, for a similar observation in Russian). This kind of emphatic pitch can follow after both hesi- tative uses of *uŋun* and placeholder uses: in example (47), the first token of the filler is not morphosyntactically integrated and is hence identifiable as a hesita- tive, with the delayed constituent *bakaja* ‘they found’ pronounced with emphatic high pitch on the first syllable (Figure 20). The second token of the filler carries Accusative case and is clearly the placeholder for the NP *tcoltcoki sama:nman* ‘the shaman of the weasels’; this carries even higher pitch on the first syllable of *tcoltcoki* ‘weasel’. This high pitch and intensity on the delayed constituent under- lines the fact for the hearer that the word search was successfully concluded.

(47) sama:n-a gəla:ktə-na:-ja:n o:-mi (0) uŋun (420)
shaman-ACC.INDF look.for-AM-SS.ANT make.SS.COND FLR
baka-ja əmən (0) uŋun-ma (660) tcoltcoki
find-NFUT[3PL] one FLR-ACC Siberian.weasel
sama:n-ma-n
shaman-ACC-3SG

‘Having gone to look for a shaman... **uhm...** they found a
**whatchamacallit**, a shaman of the Siberian weasels.’

[APK_frog_tale: 120; ID 224-225]

The Negidal data partly contradict the common assumption that speakers en-
counter more difficulties in retrieving infrequent lexemes or items that are less
<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Figure 20: Waveform and pitch contour of example (47)</figcaption></figure>

predictable in a given discourse context (Lickley 2015: 461–462): an admittedly
rather limited analysis of the nature of the overt targets of placeholders shows
that only about 40% are items that might be considered rare,<fnref n="18" /> such as names
of people who lived a long time ago and whom one has hence not referred to
in a while, or archaic cultural objects such as shaman’s tambourines, particular
types of footwear, or the prow of birchbark boats. In contrast, nearly 39% of the
fillers are triggered by common or even very common items, sometimes on mul-
tiple occasions. For instance, ‘river/stream’, which refers to a crucial feature of
the Negidal environment, occurs in the corpus 63 times and triggers a filler four
times, and ‘dish/container’ (55 occurrences in the corpus) elicits a filler five times.
Even some very frequent verbs, such as ‘make’ (375 occurrences in the corpus) or
‘think’ (225 occurrences in the corpus) elicit three and four fillers, respectively.

There are furthermore several instances when items that were produced in the
immediately preceding context trigger the use of a placeholder, as described in
§4.1.5 for the ‘resumptive pro-verb’ use of *upun*. Such rather unexpected uses of
the filler have also been noted for the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy “noun substitute”
by LeSourd (2003: 142):

<footnote n="18">¹⁸This was estimated by checking the frequency of items in the corpus via concordance searches, but also by assuming that the names of characters in folk tales or of people who lived a long time ago would not be commonly used and hence would no longer be activated (cf. Schegloff 1979: 274), or that the terms for archaic cultural items would be rarely used. Conversely, culturally salient items, like boats, fish hooks and lures, or the lean-to which serves as a vital storage room in houses, were considered to be common, even if they didn’t occur very frequently in the corpus. Note that when the probable delayed constituent of hesitative or indeterminate uses is included in the analysis, the relative proportions of rare vs. (very) common items remain the same.</footnote>
[M]any occurrences of the noun substitute do not appear to be of this char-
acter [a hesitation signal]. Often the [placeholder] pronoun is used to in-
troduce a common word that one might expect a speaker to find easy to
recall. A speaker will sometimes employ the noun substitute to introduce a
noun that he or she has already used several times in a given discourse. Not
surprisingly, there is often no appreciable pause in such cases before the
speaker provides the target noun. We are accordingly faced with a puzzle.
Why do speakers apparently use a hesitation form even when they seem to
feel no need to hesitate?

For example, in the sequence in (48) DIN asks her mother APN whether she
remembers Tanja Trofimova's father, but then repeats her question using the
placeholder. Apart from 'father' being a very common word (243 instances in the
corpus) that one might expect to have been easily retrievable, it was produced
a mere six seconds before the placeholder, and thus might be assumed to have
still been activated when DIN rephrased her question – yet it is notable that she
pauses for a considerable stretch of time before the placeholder.

(48) a. DIN: si: *opi:* *tanja-ŋasa trofimov-ŋasa amin-ŋasa-βa-n*
2SG mother.VOC PN-DEC PN-DEC father-DEC-ACC-3SG
*jo-ŋtci-s*
remember-DUR[NFUT]-2SG
'Mama, do you remember the late father of late Tanja Trofimova?'

b. APN: ni:?
'Who ?'

c. DIN: *tanja-ŋasa trofimov-ŋasa* (1530) **uyun-ma-n** { APN: *ami-nin* }
PN-DEC PN-DEC FLR-ACC-3SG father-3SG

DIN: *amin-ma-n* jo-ŋtci-s
father-ACC-3SG remember-DUR[NFUT]-2SG

‘DIN: Late Tanja Trofimova’s **whatchamacallit**… {APN: her father}
DIN: … do you remember **her father**?’

[APN_DIN_conversation: 59-63; ID 320]

In some instances, it is likely that the speakers were distracted (cf. Lickley
2015: 463) and hence couldn't immediately retrieve the item they needed. Un-
fortunately, since we lack video recordings for most of the Negidal data, it is
impossible to identify external distractors, such as a bird flying by outside or a
sound at the door. Nevertheless, possible causes of distraction can be identified
in the data, as will be outlined in the following. These comprise 1) the presence of as-yet-unfamiliar linguists with a video camera and other recording devices, 2) the realization that one has made an error, or 3) the search for a different lexeme that is going on in the background.

Concerning the first point, the verb *uli-* ‘sew’, which appears in the corpus 110 times, elicited a placeholder on four occasions, once in an explanation of how to make thread out of elk sinew in which sewing was mentioned ten times. All tokens of the placeholder for ‘sew’ occurred in recordings done by linguists who were not yet very well known to the speakers and that involved both video and audiorecording. It is thus possible that the video camera and big audiorecorder in combination with foreign linguists facing the speakers (on one occasion, three linguists were present at the same time) distracted the speakers and led to their lack of concentration.

As to the second type of potential distractor, it is likely that the filler in (49) was not triggered by difficulties in retrieving the word for ‘horse’, but rather by the speaker’s realization that she made a mistake (there were three horses, and not two); this may have distracted her and led to the disfluency. This is indicated by the false start on *mo[jenma]* followed by a filled pause [əmm], and the fact that the filler, while carrying the appropriate Accusative suffix needed to substitute for ‘horse’, is pronounced with the low pitch and intensity found on the filled pause (Figure 21). In addition, there is a long pause before the numeral *jul* ‘two’, further underlining the hesitation of the speaker.

(49) *alaβ-kal* (1930) *jul* (770) *mo... əmm uŋun-ma* (590) *elan*
to.harness-IMP.SG two FS ehm FLR-ACC three
*mojen-ma gun-ə-n*
horse-ACC say-NFUT-3SG

“Harness two... **whatchamacallit**, three **horses**”, she said.

[TIN_swine: 91; ID 882]

Lastly, as mentioned above, speakers might be distracted by a word search that is going on in the background. For example, in (50) the speaker, GIK, hesitates and resorts to the placeholder before producing what appears to be the target both on the basis of syntax (Accusative case) and intonation (emphatic high pitch and strong intensity), namely *tomkolба* ‘threads’ – even though the root *tomko* ‘thread’ is found in the word that directly precedes the placeholder. In this case it seems as if what GIK might be struggling with is not the word ‘thread’, but rather the word for ‘rag’, as indicated by her further hesitations and the overt admission that she had forgotten the Negidal word for ‘rag’ (Russian *loskuty*).
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /><figcaption>Figure 21: Waveform and pitch contour of example (49)</figcaption></figure>

She may thus have been distracted by the ongoing search for this lexeme that eluded her, triggering the unexpected placeholder for the familiar and activated term ‘thread’.

(50) o:-ja-n jaβa-ja-n tomko-l-duki-n taj
make-NFUT-3SG take-NFUT-3SG thread-PL-ABL-3SG DIST
səlko-da-ββi tomko-duki-n (2550) uŋun-ma (2370)
silk.thread.R-VR-IMPERS thread-ABL-3SG FLR-ACC
tomko-l-βa (1490) ulgə-ja-n (750) taduk uŋun-ma
thread-PL-ACC to.braid-NFUT-3SG then FLR-ACC
ulgə-ja-n taj loskuty omŋut
to.braid-NFUT-3SG DIST rags.R FS[forget]

‘He first takes some of the threads, those with which one embroiders, he braids **the whatchamacallit**, the **threads**, after that he braids the whatchamacallit, the rags - I forgot (the Negidal word).’

[GIK_ostroe: 12; ID 771-772]

Such examples indicate that the planning of an utterance is not finalized before it is begun, but continues as one speaks, and that it takes place relatively far in advance and can thus interfere with ongoing speech. They further demonstrate that it is not necessarily merely the accessibility of the target item that triggers a placeholder, but that other factors play a role as well, such as level of concentration, fatigue, physical well-being, and external and internal distractions, not all of which are easily identifiable from documentation corpora such as the one used here. Some of the factors that might have played a role in the fluctuations
in filler use over time observed for the speakers APN, DIN, and GIK (Figure 16 in §4.2) are: increasing familiarity with the recording linguists and hence decreasing formality of the recording situation (for the years 2005–2010), increasing age, level of tiredness and concentration at the moment of individual recordings, and particularities of the recording situation. For example, the steep increase in use of the filler observed for DIN in 2017 (Figure 16) might be linked to her increased age as well as to the fact that she was faced solely by unfamiliar linguists, while in the preceding years there were often several members of the family present during recording sessions.

## 5.2 Fillers and utterance planning

The morphological integration of placeholders (§4.1.5) demonstrates that the syntactic outline of the utterance is planned well in advance, since inflectional morphology on the placeholder, such as case on nouns or tense suffixes and subject indexes on verbs, mirror those of the target. Mismatches in the morphology found on the placeholder and the target occur very rarely, concerning only about 3% of the verbal placeholders and less than 6% of the nominal placeholders. In addition, even when there are mismatches, these often involve morphemes that are semantically congruent, e.g. a Past Tense suffix on the verbal placeholder and a Non-Future marker on the target (51), or cases with a partial overlap in functions<fnref n="19" /> for the nominal placeholder (52). In (52), the speaker takes up the bare Allative form of the target that her sister prompts her with (indicated with curly brackets), even though she had used the possessive-marked Locative case on the placeholder.

(51) *noŋaltin kogda itce-tca-tin bi ə-si-m na:n-tiki-n*
3PL when.R see-PST-3PL 1SG NEG-NFUT-1SG 3SG-ALL-3SG
*daga-ma-ja* (1070) *uŋun-tca-l* (430) *məŋga:-ja...*
near-VR-NEG.CVB FLR-PST-PL think-NFUT[3PL]

‘When they saw that I am not coming to them they did whatchamacallit, they thought...’

[GIK_1tatarskoe: 62; ID 727]

<footnote n="19">¹⁹These involve the Locative, Dative-Essive and Allative, which can all express a goal, the Accusative instead of the Prolative, since the Accusative can occasionally express a median (as in (17) above), or the use of the unpossessed Accusative on the placeholder to mark a direct object instead of the Reflexive Possessive suffix on the target, since the latter is used to mark direct objects when the possessor is coreferential with the subject of the clause.</footnote>
(52) ηənə-m (570) uŋun-dula-j {togo-tki} togo-tki ηənə-m
go[ NFUT ]-1SG flr-loc-prfl.sg fire-all fire-all go[ NFUT ]-1SG
‘I go to whatchamacallit. {To the fire.} I go to the fire.’

[GIK_ojavi: 11-13; ID 762]

The difference in frequency of the hesitative vs. placeholder strategies across speakers (§4.2) indicates that individuals have different kinds of problems with speech formulation. Even though both young and old speakers (born after 1940 and before 1925, respectively) use the placeholder strategy three times as frequently as the hesitative strategy (Table 3), there is a notable discrepancy in frequency of hesitative uses of *uŋun* when comparing the less proficient speakers (AET, AVK, GIKlju, LIO) with the more proficient speakers (APK, APN, DIN, GIK, TIN). The former use the filler in its hesitative function nearly as frequently as in its placeholder function (Table 3). This is particularly pronounced for AET, as shown by Figure 17 in §4.2, and contrasts strongly with the more proficient speakers, who use *uŋun* as a placeholder four times more often than as a hesitative. This indicates that whereas the more proficient speakers mainly have recourse to *uŋun* to fill a particular slot in an already constructed syntactic frame, the less proficient speakers have problems not only with finding particular words, but with putting the syntactic frame in place.

<table><caption>Table 3: Comparison of hesitative vs. placeholder use by relative age and proficiency of speakers</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>young</th><th>old</th><th>weak</th><th>strong</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>HES</th><td>24.9</td><td>24.2</td><td>42.4</td><td>19.9</td></tr><tr><th>PH</th><td>75.1</td><td>75.8</td><td>57.6</td><td>80.1</td></tr></tbody></table>

## 5.3 Fillers in repair

The Negidal filler can also be used to stall for time in order to effect a repair, as has been observed in other studies (Clark & Fox Tree 2002: 87, LeSourd 2003: 153, Ganenkov et al. 2010: 103). However, the proportion of fillers that occur in repair contexts is quite low, as has been found cross-linguistically (Lickley 2015: 463 and references therein), involving only 5.6% of all fillers.

In the current language ecology of Negidal, speakers use Russian far more in their daily life than their heritage language, yet were obviously trying very hard to produce “correct” Negidal for the recordings which are, after all, intended
to maintain a sample of the language for posterity. There is thus considerable
pressure to avoid Russian words, as shown by the relatively frequent insertion
of the filler to repair Russian lexemes (nearly 37% of the repair contexts are of
this type, cf. (53)). Yet speakers are not always successful in avoiding Russian
lexemes: in nearly 17% of occurrences of a placeholder with an overt target, that
target is a Russian word (54) or an explicit search for the Negidal equivalent of a
Russian term (55). The attempt to avoid Russian lexemes is particularly striking
in (30) above: after resorting to a headless relative clause to substitute for the
target ‘sack’, the speaker finally gives up and uses the Russian word.

(53) a:ji-dgi-ja-n gun(-ə-n) e:fan e: babuf... (80) uŋun-mi call-REP-NFUT-3SG say-NFUT-3SG FS[why] ehm granny.R FLR-PRFL.SG (140) əβəka-j jadga-s granny.EVK-PRFL.SG swear.at[NFUT]-2SG 'He called him back and says: "Why did you insult gran... your whatchamacallit, your granny?"' [APN_babulja: 41; ID 281]

(54) nonon nonon bi sinə-βə sinə omugdə-βə-s=kəna (790) previously previously 1SG 2SG.OBL-ACC FS belly-ACC-2SG=PTL uŋuni-ktə (800) meri:-ktə gun-ə-n FLR-HORT.SG to.measure.R-HORT.SG say-NFUT-3SG 'But first let me **whatchamacallit**, **measure your belly.**' [TIN_old_wolf: 46; ID 859]

(55) o:-ja-n tudgən (1200) uŋun-duki-n (2400) tcalban (480) make-NFUT-3SG fast.Y FLR-ABL-3SG birch uŋun-duki-n (2700) - beresta omŋo-tca bi-si-m FLR-ABL-3SG birchbark.R forget-PST.PTCP AUX-NFUT-1SG 'He quickly made (it) **from whatchamacallit**, **from birch whatchamacallit**. - **Birchbark**, I forgot (the word in Negidal).' [AET_burunduk: 45-46; ID 28-29]

The filler is also frequently inserted when speakers correct their choice of Negi-
dal item to a semantically more appropriate word (56) – a type of repair labelled
“appropriateness-repair” by Levelt (1983: 52). Not infrequently in these cases the
placeholder simply replaces the erroneous word without a more appropriate tar-
get being found (57).
(56) əsi=gdə osoki-j oje-duki-n atali-l-tca
now=CONTR stove.EVK-PRFL.SG top-ABL-3SG take.off-INCH-PST[3SG]
(1520) uŋun (1020) jaβa-l-tca: poleno-βa
FLR take-INCH-PST[3SG] log.R
‘Now she took off from the top of the stove... uhm... took a log (from the
top of the stove).’
[TIN_boy: 5; ID 847]

(57) a na:nman su:n-ji sam (0) uŋun-tca:ki-tin (0) kožanyj su:n-ji
and.R 3SG.ACC coat-INS close FLR-REM.PST-3PL leather.R coat-INS
‘And they had close... done whatchamacallit (covered) her with a coat, a
leather coat.’
[APN_fire_water: 60; ID 383]

In (56), the speaker first produces the word *atal-*, which means ‘take off, remove’ and is used for taking off clothes, stripping bark off trees, and removing hide from a carcass; after hesitating she replaces it with *jaβa-* ‘take, grab’, which is more appropriate for the action of taking a piece of firewood from a pile. In (57) the initially chosen verb, *sam-*, means to close a door, while the required verb is *das-* ‘to cover’.<fnref n="20" /> The filler also occurs in instances of ‘factual’ repair, such as in example (49) above, where the speaker repairs the number of horses from two to three.

## 5.4 Fillers in interaction

It has been observed in the literature (Hayashi & Yoon 2006: 499; cf. LeSourd 2003: 146–147, Keevallik 2010: 156–158) that fillers are sometimes interpreted by interlocutors as requests for help, leading to a “collaborative achievement of word search” (Hayashi & Yoon 2006: 499). While this kind of interaction is occasionally observed in the Negidal data ((58), see also (48) and (52) above), it is not very frequent: only 15 out of 364 occurrences of the filler (i.e. about 4%) in recordings in which a Negidal interlocutor was present triggered a prompt by the interlocutor.<fnref n="21" />

<footnote n="20">²⁰The initial choice of verb in (56) is probably due to the fact that in Russian *snimat*’ can mean both ‘take off’ clothes and similar items as well as ‘take down’ something from above. In (57), the initial choice of verb might have also been influenced by Russian, since the root *kryt*’ occurs both in *zakryt*’ ‘close (a door)’ and in *ukryt*/*pokryt*’ ‘cover (with a jacket, a blanket)’.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹For some texts we lack the sound files of the recordings; since I was unable to verify if there was “collaboration”, these were excluded from the count, even though some of them involved more than one Negidal speaker. Given the lack of metadata for the recordings prior to 2017, the presence of an indigenous interlocutor was assessed by whether any utterances were annotated in ELAN. This would of course miss the presence of interlocutors who didn’t say anything – so that the proportion of “collaborative achievements” cited here is an upper bound.</footnote>
(58) DIN: nu i kuṇa:kan ho... ho... (1100) **uŋun-ə-n** (2800)
PTL.R and.R young.human FS FS FLR-NFUT-3SG
bogdi-ji-j { GIK: həki-sin-ə-n } həki-sin-ə-n
leg-INS-PRFL.SG step.on-TAM1-NFUT-3SG step.on-TAM1-NFUT-3SG
taj taj selaβun
DIST DIST skewer

‘DIN: And a child did whatchamacallit with his foot {GIK: stepped}

stepped on that skewer.’ [DIN_etal_duck: 11-12; ID 586]

This “collaboration” is not always successful, as shown by the following example (59). Here, after APN utters the placeholder *uŋunəβəj* ‘something for themselves’, her daughter prompts her with the term for ‘footwear’, which APN does not take up, using a term that none of the still living speakers knew, but that might refer to a specialized type of footwear.

(59) APN: ili taj (0) **uŋun-ə-βəj** (0) pa:ti-ja
or.R DIST FLR-DEST-PRFL.PL beat.fish.skinn.ULCH-NFUT[3PL]
{ DIN: onta-ja-βaj } APN: əj amusi-ja-βaj
footwear-DEST-PRFL.PL PROX ?-DEST-PRFL.SG

‘APN: Or they beat the skin **for whatchamacallit for themselves**. {DIN: footwear for themselves} For this XXX for themselves.’

[APN_DIN_fish Skinn: 99-101; ID 335]

In the context of interactional uses of the filler one might wonder whether
recycling or its absence (cf. §4.1.3) is conditioned by the length of the pauses
surrounding the filler: do speakers feel the need to “help” their interlocutor to
follow the thread by repeating part or all of the material that accompanied the
placeholder when they take a long time to retrieve the target? As can be seen
from Table 4, this doesn’t seem to be the case: the minimal pause length is zero,
i.e. absence of a pause, both before and after the filler, irrespective of whether
there is recycling or not, and the maximal pause length is even longer after the
filler when there is no recycling. The average and median pause length after a
filler involved in recycling are a bit longer than when there is no recycling, but
not substantially so.

To summarize, the integration of placeholders demonstrates to what extent
the structure of sentences is planned before they are uttered. Furthermore, even
though the Negidal filler is used primarily in situations of disfluency, the data
analysed here show that it is not merely the search for rare words or for Negidal
alternatives of more accessible Russian words that triggers use of the filler, since
<table><caption>Table 4: Comparison of pause length (in milliseconds rounded to closest tens) with and without recycling</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">No recycling</th><th colspan="2">Recycling</th></tr><tr><th>Pause before</th><th>Pause after</th><th>Pause before</th><th>Pause after</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Minimum</th><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><th>Maximum</th><td>2840</td><td>8120</td><td>2820</td><td>3660</td></tr><tr><th>Average</th><td>690</td><td>890</td><td>730</td><td>1070</td></tr><tr><th>Median</th><td>500</td><td>660</td><td>640</td><td>770</td></tr></tbody></table>

*uŋun* is frequently used when quite common or recently uttered words elude the speaker. The filler is also not a signal to the hearer that the speaker has difficulties in continuing her sentence, as shown by the rarity of “collaborative achievement” of word searches. This is congruent with the finding that filled pauses in English do not stand out from the speech stream and hence “...are not really compatible with the speaker intending to use the filled pause as a signal” (Lickley 2015: 459). Rather, there appear to be a number of factors at play that trigger filler use, such as an ongoing search for a different lexeme or the realization that the speaker has made a mistake. Unfortunately, not all of the possible triggering factors can be elucidated with the Negidal database, since most of the recordings lack videos and detailed metadata that would let us reconstruct the external context of the speech situation.

## 6 Discussion and conclusions

The current study has shown that the Negidal filler *uŋun* is used very frequently in discourse, albeit with considerable variation across speakers. Although it can function both as a hesitative and a placeholder, the placeholder strategy predominates. Its primary function appears to be to gain time or to maintain the syntactic frame of the unfolding utterance in situations of disfluency, with pragmatic and interactive uses (avoidance or conspirational uses, turn-taking, and “collaborations” in word search) being absent or rare. Having only one item that can fulfill both strategies is cross-linguistically fairly common, being found in such varied languages as Negidal’s sister Evenki (Klyachko 2022), Russian (Podlesskaya 2010), the Caucasian languages Udi and Agul (Ganenkov et al. 2010), Amazonian Spanish (Vallejos Yopán 2023), and Tagalog (Nagaya 2022). In contrast, having
only one item that can substitute for both nouns and verbs is less common, either because languages have a placeholder that is used only for noun substitution, such as in Amazonian Spanish (Vallejos Yopán 2023) or Udi and Agul (Ganenkov et al. 2010), or because separate forms are used to stand in for nouns and verbs, as in Nahavaq (Dimock 2010) and Maliseet-Passamaquoddy (LeSourd 2003).

The placeholder strategy of the filler provides clear evidence that speakers plan the structure of their utterance in advance, before they retrieve the lexical items, since the placeholders carry the necessary inflectional morphology that integrates them into the frame of the sentence. That this planning is quite sophisticated is shown by the infrequent occurrence of mismatches between morphology on the placeholder and the target (see Figure 10 in §4.1.3). As discussed above (§5.2), these mismatches often concern “compatible” categories, such as cases that can be used with the same function and that thus “fit into” the planned frame. These are thus formally different, but semantically and syntactically congruent. The evidence from the Negidal placeholder thus strengthens the evidence from interaction errors that has been adduced in favour of structural planning in speech production (Shattuck-Hufnagel 2015: 419–421).

Several research questions have been left open and need to be addressed in the future. First of all, the current study focused mainly on the morphosyntactic aspects of the filler, with prosodic aspects being neglected; only pitch, waveform intensity, and pause length surrounding the filler were investigated (§3). Secondary markers of hesitation, such as lengthened final syllables of the filler itself and of preceding items were not taken into account, yet should be included in a full study of the phenomenon (cf. Lickley 2015: 458, and references therein: “Where “fluent” silent pause is sanctioned by prosodic structure, it is likely to be preceded by a prolonged syllable [...], and the same may apply to a hesitant pause [...]: prolongation and silence are part of the same phenomenon”).

Secondly, given that the hesitative strategy of *uŋun* is quite infrequent, with less than 25% of the occurrences being categorized as such (§4.1.1), an in-depth study of Negidal disfluency would be of interest: if speakers do not use *uŋun* when they experience difficulties with retrieving words or with planning their further discourse, how do they hesitate? Very preliminary data based on less than 1% of the corpus (comprising less than ten minutes of recordings from four fluent speakers) shows that the filler, including both its placeholder and its hesitative use, is about twice as frequent as other overt disfluencies, namely the hesitator *ðð/ɛɛ* and the lengthening of final syllables. However, silent pauses account for ~70% of all disfluencies. These preliminary data indicate that overt, “filled” hesitation is quite rare in Negidal, but they obviously need to be confirmed with a more comprehensive study.
Furthermore, the interaction of fillers with gestures (cf. Navarretta 2016) would be worth exploring further. The individual tokens adduced in §3 and §4.1.5 show interesting differences in the timing of the gesture: the pointing gesture precedes the placeholder (example (7), Figure 4), while the gaze aversion follows after the hesitative (example (5), Figure 2), and the rolling gesture accompanies theophoric use of *uŋun* in example (36) (Figure 12). It is an open question whether these distinctions are regular, and also what different kinds of gestures accompany the different uses of the filler.

Finally, a comparison with Negidal’s sister languages might provide further interesting insights into the morphosyntactic aspects of fillers, since these languages show comparable levels of morphological complexity but use fillers of different origin. Thus, Evenki (Klyachko 2022) and the Bystraja dialect of Even (Matić 2008) have dedicated fillers (*aŋi* and *uŋ*, respectively), while the Lamunkhin dialect of Even makes use of interrogative proforms: *iak/ia-* ‘what/ do what’. Preliminary data indicate that these different types of fillers might differ in how they are used, the details of which might shed more light on the diachrony and functions of fillers.

## Sources

All the examples are taken from Pakendorf & Aralova (2017) and can be found by searching for the text ID. The numbers of annotation units are those that are found in the pdf-file of the transcribed, translated and glossed text. In ELAN files with multiple speakers it is best to choose the tier ‘phrase-segnum-en’ for the relevant speaker in the ‘Grid’ view, which provides the annotation number that corresponds to that given here.

## Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on a first version of this chapter, and in particular Françoise Rose, whose continued discussion and constructive criticism helped me greatly improve the paper. I also thank my colleagues Jennifer Krzonowski and Rémi Anselme for assistance: Jennifer for writing the Praat script that let me automatize most of the investigation of the intonation patterns, and Rémi for providing me with the video stills shown in some figures, for help with producing images in Praat and Excel, and for ensuring that the LATEX version of this chapter is free of formatting errors. The data on which this study is based were collected with the generous support of ELDP
(grant MDP0346), which is gratefully acknowledged. I am also grateful to the ASLAN project (ANR-10-LABX-0081) of the Université de Lyon, for its financial support within the French program "Investments for the Future" operated by the National Research Agency (ANR). I furthermore thank Natalia Aralova for helpful discussion of the Negidal data not only while we were compiling the corpus, but also with respect to several examples of the filler. Last, but definitely not least, I thank all the Negidal speakers whom I had the pleasure to meet in person for their contributions to the corpus, and most especially DIN and GIK for their many hours of patient work on transcriptions, translations, and clarification of tricky questions.

Abbreviations used in glosses

1, 2, 3 indicate person, SG, PL indicate singular and plural number, respectively.

<table><tr><td>ABL</td><td>ablative</td><td>EX</td><td>exclusive</td></tr><tr><td>ACC</td><td>accusative</td><td>FLR</td><td>filler</td></tr><tr><td>ACC.INDF</td><td>indefinite accusative</td><td>FOC</td><td>focus</td></tr><tr><td>ADD</td><td>additive</td><td>FS</td><td>false start</td></tr><tr><td>ADV.BALL</td><td>adverbial allative</td><td>HAB</td><td>habitual aspect</td></tr><tr><td>ADVR</td><td>adverbializer</td><td>HAB.PTCP</td><td>habitual participle</td></tr><tr><td>ALL</td><td>allative</td><td>HORT</td><td>hortative (1st person imperative)</td></tr><tr><td>AM</td><td>associated motion</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>AUX</td><td>auxiliary</td><td>IDEO</td><td>ideophone</td></tr><tr><td>CAUS</td><td>causative</td><td>IMP</td><td>immediate future</td></tr><tr><td>COND</td><td>conditional</td><td></td><td>imperative (2nd person)</td></tr><tr><td>CONTR</td><td>contrastive</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>COP</td><td>copula</td><td>IMPERS</td><td>impersonal</td></tr><tr><td>DAT.ESS</td><td>dative-essive</td><td>INCH</td><td>inchoative</td></tr><tr><td>DEC</td><td>decessive (refers to deceased people)</td><td>INS</td><td>instrumental</td></tr><tr><td>DEONT</td><td>deontic future</td><td>INTERJ</td><td>interjection</td></tr><tr><td>DEST</td><td>destinative</td><td>INTR</td><td>intransitive</td></tr><tr><td>DIM</td><td>diminutive</td><td>INTS</td><td>intensive</td></tr><tr><td>DIST</td><td>distal demonstrative</td><td>INTS.ADJ</td><td>intensive</td></tr><tr><td>DP</td><td>discourse particle</td><td></td><td>adjectivizer</td></tr><tr><td>DUR</td><td>durative</td><td>ITER</td><td>iterative</td></tr><tr><td>EUPH</td><td>euphemism</td><td>LOC</td><td>locative</td></tr><tr><td>EVK</td><td>Evenki borrowing</td><td>MULT</td><td>multiplicative</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>NEG</td><td>negative auxiliary</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>NEG.CVB</td><td>negative converb</td><td>REP</td><td>refactive (repeated action)</td></tr><tr><td>NEG.FUT</td><td>future tense suffix</td><td>RES</td><td>resultative</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>restricted to</td><td>RESTR</td><td>restrictive</td></tr><tr><td>NFUT</td><td>non-future</td><td>SIDE</td><td>derivative suffix with</td></tr><tr><td>NNC</td><td>borrowing from a</td><td>SML</td><td>a meaning of 'side'</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Nanaic language</td><td>SMLF</td><td>similative</td></tr><tr><td>NUM(DAYS)</td><td>numeral derivation</td><td>SS.ANT</td><td>semelfactive</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>expressing number</td><td></td><td>same-subject anterior</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>of days</td><td></td><td>converb</td></tr><tr><td>OBL</td><td>oblique</td><td>SS.COND</td><td>same-subject</td></tr><tr><td>PASS.PTCP</td><td>passive participle</td><td></td><td>conditional converb</td></tr><tr><td>PL.HUM</td><td>plural of nouns</td><td>SS.DUR</td><td>same-subject durative</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>designating</td><td></td><td>converb</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>humans</td><td>SS.SIM</td><td>same-subject</td></tr><tr><td>PN</td><td>personal name</td><td></td><td>simultaneous converb</td></tr><tr><td>POSS</td><td>marker of</td><td>SUDDEN</td><td>sudden action</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>non-canonical</td><td>TAM</td><td>tense-aspect-mood</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>possessive</td><td></td><td>marker</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>construction</td><td>TR</td><td>transitive</td></tr><tr><td>PRFL</td><td>reflexive possessive</td><td>ULCH</td><td>Ulch borrowing</td></tr><tr><td>PROL</td><td>prolative</td><td>VAL</td><td>valency-changing</td></tr><tr><td>PROX</td><td>proximal</td><td></td><td>suffix</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>demonstrative</td><td>VOC</td><td>vocative</td></tr><tr><td>PRS.PTCP</td><td>present participle</td><td>VR</td><td>verbalizer</td></tr><tr><td>PST</td><td>past tense</td><td>VS.PURP</td><td>variable-subject</td></tr><tr><td>PST.PTCP</td><td>past participle</td><td></td><td>purposive converb</td></tr><tr><td>PTL</td><td>particle</td><td>VS.SIM</td><td>variable-subject</td></tr><tr><td>Q.FUT</td><td>interrogative future</td><td></td><td>simultaneous converb</td></tr><tr><td>R</td><td>Russian borrowing</td><td>Y</td><td>Sakha (Yakut)</td></tr><tr><td>REM.PST</td><td>remote past</td><td></td><td>borrowing</td></tr><tr><td>REM.PTCP</td><td>remote participle</td><td></td><td></td></tr></table>

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