Filler Verbs in Modern Georgian Nino Amiridze Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University Nino.Amiridze@let.uu.nl Cross-linguistically filler nouns and verbs are used when speakers cannot recall a lexical item; when they cannot choose the right lexical item because of lacking education, knowledge or infor- mation; or when they intentionally avoid verbalization for different pragmatic reasons. Among filler nouns are the English thingummy, German Dingsbums and Italian coso/cosa (derived from the noun cosa ”thing”). There are filler verbs of various origin across languages that serve as placehold- ers for synthetic verb forms in discourse. For instance, [Sko77] and [Dun99] report Chukchi filler verbs based on the interrogative/indefinite stem req- meaning “do what”, “do something”. Some languages use an inflected dummy stem derived from the lexical item thing (Italian cosare (1), Eng- lish thingo (2) from [Pow91]), others make use of a grammaticalized root originally meaning “do” (Japanese are suru (3) from [Kit99, pp. 390-391]) or Georgian imaskna, the focus of this paper (see (4a) from [Zos80, p. 192], (4b), (5) as well a [Ami04]). According to [FHJ96], formal means used in repair strategies are highly dependent on the mor- phological characteristics of the language. For instance, to construct verbal fillers, analytical lan- guages would use a dummy noun compounded with an auxiliary while synthetic languages would use an affixed dummy root. Some languages employing both affixation and analytical formation, may illustrate both. However, as argued in this paper, it should not be necessary for fillers to obey morphosyntactic principles of particular languages. For instance, although verbal affixation rules in Georgian disallow insertion of any kind of material in between prefixes [Boe02], Georgian verbal fillers illustrate a grammaticalized distal demonstrative imas between the preverb and agreement prefix (4). This item is problematic to be qualified either as a clitic or as an incorporated element in filler verbs. Additionally, the Georgian filler verbs illustrate multiple occurrence of an agreement marker (5) that is exceptional for Georgian and is cross-linguistically a rare phenomenon (called recently ’exuberant agreement’ [Har]). Georgian filler verbs can vary according to person, number, tense, aspect, modality and con- sequently can be used as a substitute for lexical verbs of any semantic class in any TAM Series in discourse. This paper focuses on the use of the Georgian filler verbs as a pragmatically motivated substitution for lexical verb forms in discourse. The use reveals the possibility to manipulate the presence of particular verbal affixes in the form of filler verbs, in order to drop a hint regarding the implied lexical verb form. Or, on the contrary, by the absence of certain affixation in filler verbs, it is possible to underspecify certain information coded by those affixes and, thus, make it difficult (and sometimes, even impossible) for the hearer to guess the implied lexical verb form. This turns filler verbs in Georgian into a pragmatic tool to make utterances more or less ambiguous in discourse. For instance, among the two Georgian filler verbs gamo-imas-v-kn-a (4a) and gamo-imas-v-u-kn-a (4b) the latter one would be used, if the utterer intends to specify the presence of the indirect object 1