Inspired by the seminal volume of Amiridze et al.1, interest in placeholders and related items in the languages of the world has burgeoned in recent years, both from a descriptive and a theoretical perspective (cf. among many others, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). A particular focus of the recent literature has been on the pragmatic extensions of placeholders, demonstrating that these are not merely used in situations of disfluency to substitute for words that momentarily elude the speaker8, but are frequently used intentionally to avoid terms for reasons of politeness, ‘conspirational’ motivations, or rhetorical purposes (e.g. 9, 6). In this paper, we return to morphosyntactic aspects of placeholders and related items to further advance the typology first proposed by Podlesskaya10, based on recent descriptions. First of all, it has become clear that in many languages, one item functions as the predominant placeholder. This is not necessarily restricted to nouns, as suggested by Podlesskaya10; instead it is frequently a universal placeholder, being able to substitute for both nouns and verbs, and often even other parts of speech. In some languages, such as Komnzo11 or Dalabon12, placeholders can even substitute for larger phrases and clauses. Contrary to previous expectations, the target is very often left unexpressed, with speakers leaving it to their hearers to deduce its referent from the context. Furthermore, although Hayashi & Yoon8 view placeholders and hesitatives as separate categories, in many languages, such as Northern Pastaza Quichua13 or Nasal14, it is one element that fulfills both functions; this could thus be considered a generic ‘filler’. As shown by detailed corpus studies of French7, Besemah15, and Negidal16, the two functions of these fillers are not necessarily prosodically or syntactically distinct, indicating that they represent a continuum from pure hesitation at one end to pure placeholding at the other end, via various intermediate degrees of hesitation and substitution. It is not only the distinction between placeholders and hesitatives that emerges as being rather more vague than initially thought, but the distinction between fillers and their sources is frequently also fuzzy, for instance in Komnzo11, where a demonstrative has grammaticalized into a placeholder, or in the Lamunkhin dialect of Even, where the interrogative proforms iak/ia- ‘(do) what’ function as fillers. While numerous studies have focused on the part of speech of the placeholder target, very few address the question of the part of speech of the placeholder itself. Based on our emerging typology, it is clear that this is highly language-specific. For example, in Negidal a dedicated form has both hesitative and placeholder uses and substitutes for nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech16; this could hence be viewed as a dedicated part of speech ‘filler’. In Teko, a generic noun has developed distinct hesitative and nominal placeholder functions17; these could thus be assigned to two distinct parts of speech, ‘hesitative’ and noun. We hope that the data presented here will be useful for further typological studies on the topic and provide analytical models for descriptive linguists.