The Archive Vol. 6, No. 1 (2025)

The Empty Root Kuan in Radio Conversations: Its Versatile Functions and Syntactic Distribution

Abstract

This study looked into the pragmatic functions and the syntactic distribution of the empty root kuan in select radio conversations. These pragmatic functions and syntactic slots were based on the frameworks first proposed by Tanangkingsing (2009) and Hsieh and Tanangkingsing (2006) respectively. The present study focused on two Wanted Forever radio segments with a matchmaking nature livestreamed on Facebook. These segments also became the primary source of data. The results of the study showed that, in the specified context of radio conversations, the most productive among the functions was only the placeholder function. The other functions were not or were only sparingly observed in the limited dataset. However, in regard to the empty root’s versatility in assuming a particular syntactic slot, the present study affirmed, given that all syntactic slots had substantial representative tokens, that the noun phrase constituent slot is the most productive. The study indicates that the meaning of the empty root kuan can indeed be negotiated and its emptiness lies in the fact that it is nothing beyond the context of the conversation.

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