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Article published In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages: Online-First Articles

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A versatile placeholder in Hawai‘i Creole

The case of polyfunctional da kine

ORCiD logo with link | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Republic of Korea
ORCiD logo with link | Independent Researcher, United States
Published online: 8 July 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.24014.ser
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Placeholder (PH)
    • 2.2Hawai‘i Creole (HC)
    • 2.3Previous studies on da kine
  • 3.Data
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Result overview
  • 4.Grammatical description
    • 4.1Nominal category
    • 4.2Verbal category
    • 4.3Adjectival category
    • 4.4Clausal category
    • 4.5Prospects
  • 5.Functional description
    • 5.1Ability-related functions
    • 5.2Preference-related functions
    • 5.3Non-PH functions
    • 5.4Diachronic consideration
    • 5.5Prospects
  • 6.Toward a pragmatic account
    • 6.1Preliminaries
    • 6.2Analysis
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Data sources
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