From demonstrative to filler: Este in Amazonian Spanish and beyond

Abstract

In Amazonian Spanish, este has two main functions: demonstrative and filler. Filler-este, which originally evolved from demonstrative-este, serves to deal with word-formulation delays during spontaneous speech production. Analyses of conversations reveal that este primarily functions as a filler: 70% of the tokens of este are either fillers serving as placeholders, which replace lexical items in specific syntactic slots, or fillers serving as hesitators, which are non-referential and distributionally free. Further, phonetic analyses show that demonstrative-este and filler-este exhibit different phonetic shapes. Demonstrative-este patterns with disyllabic words with penultimate stress - the first vowel is longer than the second vowel. Filler-este shows the opposite configuration - the second vowel is significantly longer than the first vowel. The evolution of este from demonstrative to filler may have been facilitated by two conspiring forces: its use as cataphor whose referent comes later in the discourse, and its use for recognitional purposes, in which establishing a referent relies on shared knowledge. This use is often accompanied by signs of hesitation. The diachronic proposal outlined here can account for the emergence of the filler-este in several varieties of Spanish spoken in Latin America. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of the syntax of real-time interaction.