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 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.