A versatile placeholder in Hawai‘i Creole

A placeholder is a dummy element with which a speaker fills the grammatical slot of a target form that they are unable or unwilling to produce. Despite the growing body of work on placeholders, no extensive attention has been paid to placeholders in pidgin and creole languages. In this paper, we characterize da kine (cf. ‘the kind’) in Hawai‘i Creole as a placeholder and describe its grammatical and functional properties through examples retrieved from oral histories. Grammatically, da kine is ‘versatile’ in that it replaces diverse elements (e.g. nominal, verbal, adjectival, clausal). Functionally, the uses of da kine are motivated by various factors (e.g. interactional, cognitive). Da kine also has other uses as a hesitation marker and a general extender. Furthermore, we suggest a Gricean pragmatic account of da kine and analyze a wide range of its functions as conversational implicatures.