• SFB 1718 „Common Ground“, Projekt B3 Spanish Mitigators: How to Switch Non-Default Common Ground Updates (since October 2025) 

  PIs: Wiltrud Mihatsch and Inga Hennecke (https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/283260)

Project B3 contributes to the CRC by investigating Spanish mitigators as devices for managing non-default Common Ground updates. Its central focus is to develop a detailed taxonomy of non-default CG updates associated with mitigator uses and to characterize their properties across different communicative contexts in Argentinian and Peninsular Spanish. 

Mitigation may arise via implicature, but also through highly conventionalized markers such as tipo, como (que) and digamos. Mitigators can be employed to weaken speaker commitment to an utterance and frequently occur in contexts involving epistemic asymmetries, social hierarchies, controversial topics, or potentially face-threatening content. The project examines how such devices facilitate the entry of propositions into the CG and whether they themselves contribute to, or remain absent from, the subsequently represented CG content. 

A core focus lies on differences between more and less conventionalized mitigators with respect to at-issueness, syntactic position, and their morphosyntactic, prosodic, and phonetic profiles. Special attention is paid to prosodic and acoustic features and their relation to not-at-issue status and update type. 

Methodologically, the project combines qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses with corpus-based prosodic analyses, and acceptability-judgment and text-evaluation experiments. The project ultimately seeks to determine how mitigation support non-default CG updates and what this implies for theoretical models of CG management. 

The project staff are Prof. Dr. Wiltrud Mihatsch (PI), Prof. Dr. Inga Hennecke (PI), Patricia Dasì (PhD student) and Valentín Torres (PhD student).

• Project member and joint PhD supervision within the project „Compacting the residue in the Mass/Count domain: on 'singular' singularia tantum in French and Dutch” (FWO-onderzoeksproject G091726N, FWO PRJ Senior 2026) (since January 2026)

  PI: Peter Lauwers, Ghent University (https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/peter.lauwers)

• Project: Placeholder expressions in Asian and European languages (since 2024)

  Wiltrud Mihatsch, Inga Hennecke (University of Tübingen) and Tohru Seraku (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea)

In spontaneous discourse, speakers may use so-called ‘placeholders’, especially when they have difficulty activating particular words or phrases. Examples of European placeholders are French truc, machin, bidule and chose, Italian coso and come si chiama, Portuguese coisa and coiso, Spanish chisme, cacharro, cosa and, in some dialects, coso, German Dings, Dingsbums and English thing, thingy and whatchamacallit. Most Romance and Germanic placeholders seem to be based on nouns, while crosslinguistically placeholders are often based on pronouns, especially demonstratives and interrogatives, as in many Asian languages. Demonstrative-based placeholders include Japanese are and Korean ku and ce, whereas interrogative-based placeholders include Japanese nani, Korean mwe, and Mandarin shenme. 

Unlike lexemes, many placeholders do not encode semantic content that directly contributes to the proposition expressed. Rather, they serve as substitutes for target words or phrases that the speaker is unable or unwilling to produce for various reasons. Placeholders are typically observed in spoken colloquial language, and their communicative functions are similar to those of pragmatic or discourse markers, while their property of substituting for lexemes resembles that of certain pronouns and pro-form expressions.

Until recently, research on placeholders was limited and often appeared in small-scale, isolated publications where placeholders were not the primary focus. This began to change with the publication of Amiridze, Davis and Maclagan (2010), which brought together diverse strands of research on placeholders and hesitation fillers from a cross-linguistic perspective. Interest in the topic has grown considerably over the past few years, especially in Asia and Europe, with a number of studies providing detailed syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic analyses. A recent milestone is the volume Fillers: Hesitatives and Placeholders, edited by Françoise Rose and Brigitte Pakendorf, which was published in 2025.

In October 2024, Wiltrud Mihatsch and Inga Hennecke hosted a DFG-funded conference dedicated specifically to placeholders, titled ‘Placeholders in East and West’. Together with Tohru Seraku we are currently preparing a crosslinguistic comparative study of placeholders based on selected talks of our workshop and further contributions: 

     (in preparation) Placeholders – exploring uncharted territories.
     To appear in: De Gruyter series Trends in Linguistics.

We are also preparing a special issue on Noun-based placeholders in French, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of French Language Studies.

Apart from various papers on placeholders we are preparing two monographs, expected to be the first monographs on the topic. Tohru Seraku is currently drafting a book-length study with a strong crosslinguistic perspective:

     Seraku, Tohru (in prep.). Placeholders in Natural Language: The Art of Substitution and Beyond. 
     Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wiltrud Mihatsch is working on a proposal for a monograph on Romance placeholders.

Furthermore, we have now started analysing the results of our typological survey on placeholders in Europe and Asia. We would like to thank all our colleagues and informants who contributed to our survey! We will keep you posted about the outcome.

If you would still like to participate (any language is welcome!), here is the link to our survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14HBDVK7hjdxxSJe33wJzFqoYAczyB4DZ1pPb3tP7P8Y/edit?ts=68ca9269

We will present first results of our survey in a joint talk, “Placeholders as function words: Typological evidence from Asian and European languages”, at ALT 2026 (the16th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology) in Lyon, 1-3 July 2026.