A short note on honorifics and personal articles in Spanish and Catalan and its consequences for the theory of proper names
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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.
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José Camacho
Francesc Roca
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(c) Andrés Saab, 2021
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