2026/05/07 by Carlos Muñoz Pérez · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.1075/rro.25027.mux
crossref issued 2026/05/07 · crossref published 2026/05/07 · crossref published-online 2026/05/07 · openalex publication_date 2026/05/07 · crossref created 2026/05/07 · crossref deposited 2026/05/07 · openalex created_date 2026/05/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30
Abstract This paper examines the grammatical behavior of two nominal placeholders in Latin American Spanish: coso in Rioplatense Spanish and este / esta in Chilean Spanish. These expressions function as substitutes for nouns that are forgotten or deliberately left unmentioned. Drawing on novel data, I show that both elements systematically give rise to interpretations involving a sort of epistemic specificity, a property that distinguishes them from general nouns such as cosa ‘thing’. At the same time, they differ with respect to a number of morphosyntactic properties. To account for these contrasts, I propose an analysis according to which coso is a noun that incorporates into a specificity projection within the nominal structure, while este / esta is a demonstrative modifier accompanying a phonologically empty noun. This analysis shows that nominal placeholders do not form a uniform grammatical class; rather, their varying properties emerge from the interaction of lexical and morphosyntactic factors.