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 CamachoFrancesc Roca

The structure of plural last names in Spanish and other languages

“…In this section, I will propose an important structural difference: last names include a null N, whereas first names do not. Bernstein, Ordóñez & Roca (2019) For varieties that show the pattern in (36), restricting don/doña to first names, if the honorific requires a numberless nominal head, as Saab (2021) proposes, the ungrammaticality of (36) suggests that the complement of don/doña does not have those properties. I suggest that the last name appears with a null category, such as the one in (37).…”

“…note that the honorific don/doña 'mister/miss' can only appear in singular with first names (see (35)), an observation thatSaab (2021) derives from the proposal that proper names lack a Num head.7 The ultimate reason why the honorific is incompatible with a category headed by Num is not obvious. Honorifics can be plural, as in the case of los señores González 'the Mr-pl Gonzalez' in Spanish.An anonymous reviewer finds (36) grammatical, suggesting the dialectal variation.…”