Introducing expressives through equations. Implications for the theory of nominal predication in Romance

Abstract

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 shitof an apartment’). I use what I call Potts’ Criterion as a way to detect whether or nota given term has predicative force at the truth-conditional level. The observation isthat epithets do not have such a predicative import in binominal constructions of therelevant type, a clear indication that these binominals do not involve predicationalunderlying structures of the type proposed in Den Dikken (2006) and most, if notall, mainstream approaches to binominals in Romance. I then propose that thesyntactic and semantic connection between epithets/expressives and their relatedDPs/NPs is a particular type of equation between those DPs/NPs and an underlyingindexical term, denoting in individuals or in properties depending on the relevantconstruction.