Introducing expressives through equations. Implications for the theory of nominal predication in Romance
Andrés Saab
December 2022 

This paper offers a new theory of binominal constructions in Spanish (e.g., el idiota de Andrés ‘That idiot Andrés’, una mierda de departamento ‘a shit of an apartment’). I use what I call Potts’ Criterion as a way to detect whether or not a given term has predicative force at the truth-conditional level. The observation is that epithets do not have such a predicative import in binominal constructions of the relevant type, a clear indication that these binominals do not involve predicational underlying structures of the type proposed in Den Dikken (2006) and most, if not all, mainstream approaches to binominals in Romance. I then propose that the syntactic and semantic connection between epithets/expressives and their related DPs/NPs is a particular type of equation between those DPs/NPs and an underlying indexical term, denoting in individuals or in properties depending on the relevant construction.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006718 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In John R. Starr, Juhyae Kim, y Burak Öney (eds.), Proceeding of SALT 32, 356-383. [doi: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v1i0.5330]
keywords:	expressivity, epithets, predication, equations, spanish, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [July 2022]
Downloaded:	576 times

 

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