A short note on honorifics and personal articles in Spanish and Catalan and its consequences for the theory of proper names

Abstract

Building on recent findings in Bernstein et al. (2019), regarding the syntactic distribution of personal articles in Catalan and honorifics in Spanish, I propose that they are pure expressives (in Potts’ (2005) sense) that take an entity as argument and return the same entity at the at-issue level and a conventionally implicated proposition in a parallel meaning dimension. If this analysis turns out to be correct, the expressive / proper name interaction in these languages will constitute a new piece of evidence against the predicative analysis of proper names. Reviewed by: José Camacho Francesc Roca

Keywords

• honorifics
• personal articles
• Catalan
• Spanish
• proper names
• expressives