A Smurf-based approach to placeholder expressions

Abstract

The Smurf comics series is, among others, famous for the so-called "smurf language", in which words or parts of words can be replaced by "smurf". We will argue that this "smurfing" has the properties of placeholding. Based on data from German translations of Smurf comics, we will provide a formalization of smurfing in German which can be generalized to a theory of placeholder expressions.