Expletives

La siguiente tesis estudia un amplio número de construcciones del español rioplatense que contienen un clítico marginal de acusativo femenino (la y las). Adoptando el marco de la Morfología Distribuida (Halle & Marantz, 1993 y trabajos posteriores), perseguimos dos objetivos centrales. En primer lugar, nos proponemos llevar a cabo una descripción morfosintáctica, semántica y pragmática de los 452 verbos que integran el corpus diseñado, el cual está organizado en tres grupos con propiedades y comportamientos definidos: (i) verbos transitivos (e.g. sacarla barata, cortarla); (ii) verbos inergativos (e.g. matearla, caretearla); (iii) verbos inacusativos (e.g. pirarla, morirla). En segundo lugar, la propuesta incluye un análisis morfosintáctico del clítico marginal en relación a su interpretación semántica y su morfología de género, número y caso, y realiza un abordaje composicional y sintactista de la totalidad de las construcciones, a diferencia de la mayoría de los antecedentes en la bibliografía, que suelen ubicarlas dentro del ámbito de la lexicografía al considerarlas sintagmas (semi)lexicalizados, locuciones o unidades fraseológicas. Amén de que abarca en simultáneo tres tipos de estructuras que hasta el momento han sido estudiadas por separado (i-iii), una de las contribuciones de la tesis constituye el análisis de construcciones que no han sido exploradas en la literatura, dentro de las cuales se destacan casos de extraposición similares al inglés (e.g. No me la esperaba que Juan sea un facho), verbos meteorológicos (e.g. La re llovió anoche) y, fundamentalmente, verbos inacusativos con clítico acusativo marginal (e.g. La re murió Harry al final). En conclusión, mostramos que la gran mayoría de las secuencias estudiadas constituyen un fenómeno productivo regido por los principios de la sintaxis.

Although the phenomenon of swearing is universal to nearly all languages and cultures, it has been ignored by the scholars for many years, due to its provocative nature. Currently, however, it is safe to say that the sphere of crude language is in a state of an intensive theoretical flux. The following paper contributed to the above-mentioned movement by investigating the attitude of the English Philology Students at the University of Rzeszów towards the most commonly encountered English and Polish swear words. The principal objective of the research was to confirm or reject the hypothesis according to which derogatory expressions in L2 are deemed less offensive than their equivalents in L1. The said premise was tested by dint of a questionnaire designed around the most popular English and Polish swear words, presented both in context and in isolation. Apart from examining the hypothesis, the data acquired via the research instrument provided an insight into the most tabooed concepts found among young Poles.

This paper is an inquiry about the subcomponent of the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) that is relevant for second position phenomena: the Left Edge Filling Trigger (LEFT). LEFT basically amounts to a classical morphological obligatory exponence effect, except it is instantiated at the sentence level. It crosslinguistically operates in a postsyntactic realizational morphological module. I show that LEFT is an active rule of Universal Grammar, providing empirical arguments from Breton, a Celtic VSO language showing an extra conspicuous V2 requirement. I propose a radical reanalysis of language typology of word order. Classical V2 languages are conspicuously V2. SVO is a subtype. So-called V1 languages are either predicate fronting languages (Tense second), or inconspicuously V2. I discuss a crosslinguistic typology of LEFT effects, with great attention to inconspicuous satisfiers, among them null expletives for which I present evidence. I argue accordingly for a drastic extension of the typology of expletives.

This paper proposes a reanalysis of exceptional case-marking in English. The new analysis is based on languages in which accusative case is assigned to the subject of a subordinate object clause when it undergoes long-distance extraction into the matrix clause, and languages in which object agreement is expressed overtly and in which, under specific circumstances, the verb of the superordinate clause enters into object agreement with an argument (subject or object) of the subordinate clause. Exceptional case-marking refers to the subject of the subordinate clause being accusative case-marked by the verb of the superordinate clause, while at the same time receiving its theta-role from the verb of the subordinate clause. In English, it is assumed that exceptional case-marking takes place because of the impossibility of a non-finite T-head in the subordinate clause to check the case feature of its subject, resulting in it having its case-feature valued by the verb of the superordinate clause. While there has been a number of analyses of ECM in English, questions such as the structure of the subordinate clause, the position of its subject, the valency and selectional properties of the verb in the superordinate clause, the mechanism of accusative case-assignment and the motivation behind the cross-clausal assignment of accusative case, the degree of the lexical determinedness of the process, as well as the generalizability of the underlying syntactic mechanism still remain open.  A cross-linguistic approach to the analysis of exceptional case-marking raises the question of whether exceptional case-marking should be limited to contexts where there is a non-finite verb in the subordinate clause. In languages such as Hungarian, accusative case-assignment to the subject of a subordinate clause by the verb of the superordinate clause has been noted in contexts in which there is a finite verb in the subordinate clause during long-distance subject extraction. This paper analyzes the assignment of accusative case by the verb of a superordinate clause to the subjects of both non-finite and finite subordinate clauses as a single syntactic phenomenon that does not assume the "exceptionality" of accusative case-assignment. Accusative case on the subject of the subordinate clause is explained through the existing mechanisms of agreement and feature checking/valuation, and a cross-linguistic analysis that assumes a difference in the structural representation of subordinate clauses with non-finite versus finite verbs is presented.

The paper discusses syntactic constructions with a zero subject, with focus on data from 3 languages – Russian, Ukrainian and Modern Icelandic. Zero subjects are defined in the paper according to the Meaning-Text-Theory (MTT) tradition as symbolic objects with an empty signifier and non-empty signified. Zero subject lexemes have role-and-reference semantics of their own and their meaning is not equivalent to the meaning of any non-zero signs in the same language. Zero subjects share some syntactic properties with overt sentence elements taking the subject position in the same language, notably they act as agreement controllers on the verb and can be case-marked in languages where overt grammatical subjects are case-marked and control verbal agreement. The working hypothesis raised in the present paper is that zero subjects in Russian, Ukrainian and Icelandic are always specified as non-referential Agents {+ Agent,-referential} while the specification of zero subjects as '+Human' or '-Human' as well as their agreement morphology (singular, plural form) can vary across languages. Transitive impersonals in Russian, Ukrainian and Icelandic can be accounted for in terms of Mel'čuk's zero lexemes. An alternative analysis resorting to Burzio's Generalization fails to make correct predictions. The distribution of impersonals in Russian and Ukrainian has nothing to do with the intransitive split into unaccusatives vs unergatives. Most Russian verbs labeled 'psych' in the previous research are semantic causatives or agentive verbs with an external argument and valency grid <Agent, Patient>.

Expletive negation (EN) is commonly considered to be a unitary phenomenon cross-linguistically codified. In this article I provide empirical arguments to show that in fact EN consists of distinct subtypes and propose a twofold partition between weak and strong EN. More specifically, by investigating Italian, I show that weak EN structures maintain some features typically associated to standard negation (for example, they allow weak-NPIs and n-words) whereas strong EN structures do not, forming a natural class within. Moreover, I highlight a previous unnoticed case of Italian EN clauses I dubbed “Surprise Negative (SNEG) Sentences”. SNEGs are distinct from any other EN type sentences for their semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features. I will provide tests based on Ethical Dative, Expletive e, discourse- related constructions (like focus and topic phenomena) and mirativity value; moreover, I characterize them on the basis of intonational features showing that they blend interrogative and exclamative acoustic features.

The paper discusses Russian sentence patterns without overt nominative subject and analyses them in a constraint-base generative framework with syntactic zero categories and oblique subjects, i.e. oblique NPs/DPs taking the subject position. These patterns are subclassified into patterns with 'Strong' non-nominative subjects, incl. patterns with the so called Mel'cuque's zeros (улицу засыпало песком, в своем доме на гадят) and Dative-Infitinite Structures (грузовикам здесь не проехать, им еще учиться и учиться, Всем встать!) and 'Weak' non-nominative structures, incl. patterns with Dative-Predicative Structures (ей было стыдно, ему стало холодно). A prominent feature of Dative-Predicatives Structures is that the predicates capable of taking oblique Dative NPs specified as [+animate], can also take clausal subjects (Интересно, что P), and the semiexpletive stressless pronoun это (Это было интересно) but cannot take three types of weak subject simulaneously.

Malay is not known to have expletives due to their absence in the grammar, but this does not necessarily entail that expletives do not exist altogether. Gaps are observed in constructions with positions in which one would expect an expletive in a strictly non-pro-drop language such as English, hence making it seem as though Malay has a phonetically null variety of expletive. This phenomenon is common in attested pro-drop languages; however, data from Malay have not been properly documented and a principled account of the hypothesised existence of null expletives in Malay is lacking in the literature. This paper attempts to confirm whether Malay does have expletives by examining certain null-subject constructions through Chomsky's (1982) Extended Projection Principle and comparing Malay with English and Irish. All cited examples in Malay are from the online archive of Utusan newspapers and those in Irish are from McCloskey (1991) and McCloskey (1996). All other examples are from consultants who are native speakers. It is found that Malay obeys the EPP, based on the obligatory movement of a subject into TP, which consequently makes it necessary for the use of a null expletive when no other constituent is able to raise to satisfy the EPP. The merging of a null expletive therefore creates an expletive-argument chain that causes the definiteness restriction in the existential construction, which can be overridden by substituting the expletive with clitic-nya on the verb.

Mak, B. C. N., & Lee, C. (2015). Swearing is e-business: Expletives in instant messaging in Hong Kong workplaces. In E. Darics (Ed.), Digital business discourse (pp. 124-143). London: Palgrave. ISBN: 978-113-740-556-2.

This chapter explores an area that has received little attention in the field of discourse analysis, namely the use of expletives in computer-mediated workplace discourse. Generally, expletives have been associated with negative attributes such as being uneducated, anti-social, over-emotive, and provocative (Jay & Janschewitz, 2008). Nevertheless, scholars have contended that swearing can generate normal communicative effects (Christie, 2013). Early studies (e.g., Chaika, 1980; Hutton & Bolton, 2005) noted that swearing as covert prestige can bond adolescents in the street; some recent works (e.g., Daly et al., 2004) have discovered that the use of expletives in backstage workplace talk is strategic, rational, and business-oriented. But still, as Jay (2000) acknowledged, because of the taboo nature of swearing and the difficulty in collecting data, it has received very limited attention in academic research. With the increasing reliance on digital communication at work, swearing takes place not only in face-to-face interaction, but also in computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as in instant messaging, in the workplace. Despite a handful of scholarly works (e.g., Darics, 2013; Quan-Haase et al., 2005; Stephens, 2008) that have articulated the linguistic features of workplace instant messaging, there has been generally little research on swearing in workplace instant messaging, especially in Asian contexts.

An adequate linguistic theory of slurs must address three major aspects of their meaning: descriptive, evaluative, and expressive. Slurs denote specific groups, they are used to convey speakers' evaluative attitudes, and some have a very strong emotional impact. In this paper, I argue that a variety of mechanisms are required to account for this range of properties. Semantically, slurs simply denote the groups that they target. Pragmatically, speakers use slurs to ​ show​ , in the Relevance-Theoretic sense, that they share a negative attitude towards the targeted group. However, this does not yet explain the capacity of certain 'toxic' slurs to express strong emotions of the speaker and to elicit a strong emotional reaction in hearers. In order to account for this psychological impact, I posit that, like curse words, slurs undergo distinct neurolinguistic processing that links them directly to emotional centers in the brain.

The paper provides a corpus-driven analysis of the emotive meanings and pragmatic functions of Polish 'affectionate' expletives from Jezu(s)! 'Jesus!' that contain diminutive suffixes, e.g. Jezusku 'Jesus.DIM' and Jezusieńku 'Jesus.DIM.DIM'. While affectionate forms of various names, including Jezu(s), have been frequently discussed in Polish, few studies - if any - have discussed their various uses as expletives in Polish. Because these diminutive forms of expletives (DEs) are used infrequently, this study uses the Internet as corpus by collecting examples from blogs, the microblogging site Twitter, forums, and The National Corpus of Polish (NKJP). It is shown that the force evoked by the expletive Jezu(s) causes the diminutive forms to typically fall on either end of the negative-positive polarity scale; that is, the DEs rarely express neutral force. Rather, they are mainly used to convey strong positive attitude (e.g. appreciation) or negative attitude (e.g. complaint, frustration). Often, the 'softness' of the blow and/or degree of positive emotion depends on the diminutive suffix(es) used. This interesting paradox - a lexical item that is a combination of negative expletive force and positive tender diminutives - provides deeper insight into the extent of diminutive and expletive use in contemporary Polish

This paper examines the present-day characterisation and historical development of non-referential uses of the pronoun ello/ele/ell (ELLO) in certain Ibero-Romance varieties. Since overt expletives are predicted to be incompatible with referential null subjects, the appearance of ELLO in an apparently expletive position and function is typologically anomalous with respect to the null subject parameter as traditionally conceived. Recent treatment in the literature places ELLO in the C-domain, and exceptionally in SpecTP. However, existing accounts tend to assume a unified characterisation across varieties for what we claim is actually a heterogeneous phenomenon. Novel empirical data show that ELLO displays both expletive-like and discourse-oriented properties even within the same variety, targeting different structural positions cross-dialectally. Today’s variation is argued to be an effect of ELLO reaching different stages of grammaticalisation across varieties, originating from its usage in impersonal epistemic contexts. We may therefore wish to revise our typology of expletives so as to encompass a more nuanced range of parametric values.

This paper argues for the existence of lexically selected expletives, i.e. semantically vacuous elements subcategorized for by a predicate. It draws primarily on evidence from weather expressions in Basque and Italian, but it also uses independent evidence from Spanish existential haber 'there is/are' and French falloir 'be necessary' structures. These constructions are problematic for an analysis based on either quasi-arguments (Chomsky 1981) or 'traditional' (i.e. non-subcategorized) dummies, but they are amenable to an account with lexically selected expletives. Besides offering a unified analysis of seemingly unrelated phenomena, the proposal developed here yields a parsimonious theory of expletives. Moreover, the account provides additional evidence for Postal and Pullum's (1988) claim that dummies can appear in strictly subcategorized positions, challenging the traditional assumption that syntactic licensing is necessarily concomitant with semantic role assignment.

with Ciro Greco & Liliane Haegeman. In: Michelle Sheehan & Laura R. Bailey (eds.), Order and structure in syntax II: Subjecthood and argument structure, 69–93. Berlin: Language Science Press.

In our paper, we investigate a set of pronominal forms that have lost their referential meaning and might at first sight be analyzed as expletives. First, we discuss the case of Finnish, which, though a pro-drop language, displays an element sitä with expletive function; and the case of Dominican Spanish, another pro-drop language which seems to have an expletive ello but in which, unlike Finnish, the expletive conveys a speaker-related meaning. In addition, we also examine the case of Vietnamese, a radical pro-drop language which also seems to deploy an expletive nó with discourse value, and the case of the Flemish element tet, which has lost its referential value and also has a discourse function. From these data it emerges that independently of the satisfaction of formal EPP-requirements, some languages can employ expletive or expletive-like elements for discourse-related reasons in those contexts where regular expletives are required in languages like English. The data discussed here lead to a more complex picture of the nature of expletives and their function in the grammar.

Expressive adjectives or expressive expletives have been argued to voice the speaker's attitude towards the referent of the noun with which they co-occur, even though the attitude may be felt to be expressed about the referent of another sentential constituent or the state of affairs alluded to in the sentence where they are inserted. A previous pragmatic approach suggests that this is possible because these expletives perform an individual speech act, while a syntactic approach posits a feature whose detachment from a particular constituent enables the speaker's attitude to target the referent of another sentential constituent or even on the entire proposition expressed. This paper proposes an alternative relevance-theoretic account of the interpretation of utterances containing expressive expletives, which considers pragmatic factors and the cognitive processes in comprehension. It is grounded in contributions on the output of lexical pragmatic processes and the role of paralinguistic clues in utterance comprehension.

The paper discusses the advantages of a morphosyntactic parametric approach vs a lexicalist approach for the analysis of expletive subjects. It is widely acknowledged that Scandinavian languages split into two groups, as the Null-Subject (macro)parameter is concerned: Island Scandinavian languages (Icelandic, Faroese), where Agreement and Case are strong, lack obligatory expletives [MIS 1990], while Mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), which have obligatory expletives, are described as having weak/no Agreement, cf. [Holmberg & Platzack 1995], [Vikner 1995], [Falk 1993].
• I assume that this perspective is right, but argue that one needs a ternary grouping of Scandinavian language, since both Mainland Scandinavian and Island Scandinavian languages deviate from the Old Norse type.
• More specifically, I claim that Modern Scandinavian overt expletives are not just a vizualization of Old Scandinavian ‘silent’ expletives and prove that Modern Island Scandinavian zero subjects and expletives are categories with a different syntactics.
• Finally, I conclude that Scandinavian data did not make necessary such radical means as revision of the
Projection Principle, cf. [Babby 2002] or a non-configurational analysis, cf. [Faarlund 1995], [Faarlund 2001].

Locative inversion (LI) is a construction that is very prominent in Bantu languages. It involves inversion of a locative with the logical/thematic subject. The inversion is accompanied by a reversal of grammatical functions whereby the locative becomes the subject. LI is associated with a special discourse function, that of presentational focus. Within Bantu there is considerable variation, especially concerning thematic restrictions and the robustness of locative morphology. In addition, inversion may not always involve a reversal of grammatical functions. While the subjecthood of locatives is relatively easy to diagnose in languages where they agree with the verb, an alternative analysis in terms of topicalization suggests itself when there is no agreement. LI has been described for very few other languages, including English and Chinese. In both languages, the evidence for the subjecthood of the locative is limited or equivocal. LI thus appears to be a very rare phenomenon and this rarity may be the key to a fundamental understanding of the construction.

This ethnographic study examines gender through the use of expletives (“bad” words) among university students in Puerto Rico. Expletives are words that are afforded a great quantity of social power and are more accepted in the dominant gender (masculine). Men use expletives to compete with each other and boost their virility (anti-femininity). However, women that use expletives are taking on masculine roles and challenging social conventions.

In relevance-theoretic pragmatics, lexical adjustment, or ad hoc-concept construction, is considered a case of free pragmatic enrichment. It is hence included within the group of non-linguistically mandated processes that are automatically carried out during comprehension. Its output is an inferentially-specified representation of the conceptual content encoded, or activated, by open-class words like nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs. Ad hoc-concept construction is a necessary step to obtain a fully propositional, truth-evaluable form that captures in a more precise manner the portion of meaning that the speaker communicates explicitly. However, this paper argues that this lexical pragmatic process needs not always be described as completely exempt from linguistic mandate: it may sometimes be enacted and steered by a series of linguistic elements. These fall within two categories: (i) the evaluative morphemes that some lexical items may receive in some languages, and (ii) lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words. These elements would finetune the representations arising from content words in terms of more specific, context-dependent features or shades. Additionally, they could include in such representations information about the speaker’s attitude towards, or stance about, what the speakers refer to. Therefore, that information needs not always be derived as implicatures.

The paper discusses syntactic properties and distribution of non-nominative subjects in Russian. I distinguish two types of Dative subjects: one of them interferes with clausal subjects and expletive pronouns and may be referred to as &quot;weak&quot;, the second one does not interfere with any other type of subjects and may be referred to as &quot;strong&quot;. Modern Russian has a wide variety of grammatical subjects. Apart from overt nominative subjects which trigger agreement, it has clausal subjects (both CPs and VP-infinitives), oblique subjects (Specs of non-agreeing TPs), semi-expletive pronoun это &#x27;it&#x27;, &#x27;this one&#x27; and, finally, case-marked zero subjects in 3Sg. and 3Pl., cf. (Melčuk 1979). Russian zero subjects are pronouns, which select for nominative case and (+ Sg.) or (+ Pl.) agreement feature. The two zero pronouns have different role and reference properties and are bound to two different sentence patterns: ∅ people ((Vf.3.Pl); + intentional action) ∅ elements ((Vf.3.Sg); - intentional action)

Mak, B. C. N., & Lai, K. H.-Y. (2013, June 5-7). Mock impoliteness and swearwords in workplace instant-messaging. Original research paper presented at The 4th International Conference on English, Discourse and Intercultural Communication, MPI-Bell Centre of English, Macao Polytechnic Institute, Macao.

This research aims to investigate students' acknowledgments on bajingan meanings and expletive motives revealing at their experiential life. One hundred and seventy-seven undergraduate students majoring in English, Javanese, and Indonesian participated in this study. Data were collected from the closed and opened questionnaires focusing on the self-rated perception of Scherer and Sagarin's (2006) ten expletive motives, and Nicolau and Sukamto's (2013) male and female attitudes toward the expletive. The analyses used the descriptive and non-parametric statistics. The minor differences among four expletive motives were found, on the other hand, the motive of acting cool indicated a significant difference (p = .000). The negative Z value for anger expression, Z =-1.910, peer pressure, Z =-.875, tensions and frustrations relief, Z =-1.567, part of acting cool, Z =-3.607, and society acceptance, Z =-.225. The findings also indicated 10.2% females and .7% males recognized bajingan as a wagon driver, whereas 70% females and 25% males stated it as an expletive. Males showed a predominant expletive more than females toward male and mixed gender. The TV program was believed as the mostly influenced media to triggering the expletive expression. This expletive deals with the intra-and inter-individual contexts deducing the positive or negative reactions.

Abstract: I argue that despite their traditional verb-first vs. verb second partition, Welsh and Breton both instantiate a ban on verb-first and I present an analysis of these two languages as fundamentally verb second. In this view, so-called verb first orders prototypically illustrated by Welsh result from inconspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position, whereas traditional verb second prototypically illustrated by Breton results from conspicuous strategies to fill in the preverbal position. I show that both conspicuous and inconspicuous verb second orders are present in both Welsh and Breton. The difference in word order between Welsh and Breton is reduced to (i) a lexical parameter, that is availability of a free preverbal expletive particle in Welsh, and (ii) a syntactic parameter: Breton allows for the creation of expletives by short movement, a parameter shared with Icelandic and other languages instantiating stylistic fronting.

Mak, B. C. N. (2013, April 19-21). The power of English expletives in instant messaging in the workplace. Original research paper presented at The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and Literature, Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

This study attempts at investigating students’ expletive motives revealing at their experiential life. 177 students majoring in English, Javanese, and Indonesian participated in this study. Data were collected from closed and opened questionnaires focusing on self-rated perception of Scherer and Sagarin’s (2006) ten swearing motives and Nicolau and Sukamto’s (2013) male and female attitudes toward expletive. Analyses used the descriptive and non-parametric statistics. Significant differences among four swearing motives were not found. But, the motive of acting cool indicated a significant difference (p=.000). The negative Z value (Z=-1.910) for anger expression, (Z=-.875) for peer pressure, (Z=-1.567) for tensions and frustrations relief, (Z=-3.607) for part of acting cool, and (Z=-.225) for society acceptance. The findings also indicated 10.2% females and .7% males confirmed bajingan as a wagon driver, whereas 70% females and 25% males stated it as an expletive. Males showed a pred...

La plupart des descriptions de langues ouest‑africaines ne soulèvent pas la question de la reconnaissance de constructions impersonnelles, au sens de constructions prédicatives qui posent problème pour la reconnaissance d&#39;un sujet canonique. Cet article montre que des phénomènes syntaxiques largement comparables à ceux pour lesquels cette notion est couramment utilisée se rencontrent aussi en Afrique de l&#39;Ouest, notamment dans les langues de la région Sénégambienne (Sénégal, Cap‑Vert, Gambie, Guinée Bissau). Cinq domaines fonctionnels dans lesquels l&#39;absence de sujet canonique est dans les langues du monde un phénomène courant sont successivement passés en revue : (1) phrases décrivant des phénomènes météorologiques, (2) phrases se caractérisant par le caractère indéfini ou générique de l&#39;argument qui pourrait être pris comme sujet, (3) phrases se caractérisant par le caractère non topical de l&#39;argument qui pourrait être pris comme sujet, (4) phrases se caractéri...

The focus of this paper is the use of the pronoun nó as an expletive in spoken Vietnamese, a radical pro-drop language. We will describe the distribution and interpretation of this element against the background of the general discussion of the place of overt expletives in pro-drop languages. Having provided a detailed description of the empirical data, our discussion will then attempt to relate the distribution of nó to the internal structure of the predication and to the well-known distinction between thetic structures and categorical structures. In the present section we present the theoretical background of the discussion. Section 2 is a description of the empirical data. Section 3 relates these data to the articulation of subject predicate structures. Section 4 summarizes our main findings.

La plupart des descriptions de langues ouest‑africaines ne soulevent pas la question de la reconnaissance de constructions impersonnelles, au sens de constructions predicatives qui posent probleme pour la reconnaissance d&#39;un sujet canonique. Cet article montre que des phenomenes syntaxiques largement comparables a ceux pour lesquels cette notion est couramment utilisee se rencontrent aussi en Afrique de l&#39;Ouest, notamment dans les langues de la region Senegambienne (Senegal, Cap‑Vert, Gambie, Guinee Bissau). Cinq domaines fonctionnels dans lesquels l&#39;absence de sujet canonique est dans les langues du monde un phenomene courant sont successivement passes en revue : (1) phrases decrivant des phenomenes meteorologiques, (2) phrases se caracterisant par le caractere indefini ou generique de l&#39;argument qui pourrait etre pris comme sujet, (3) phrases se caracterisant par le caractere non topical de l&#39;argument qui pourrait etre pris comme sujet, (4) phrases se caracterisant par le faible degre d&#39;animeite de l&#39;argument qui pourrait etre pris comme sujet, (5) phrases se caracterisant par le faible degre d&#39;agentivite de l&#39;argument qui pourrait etre pris comme sujet.

Various linguists have identified linguistic phenomena that express emotions rather than purely ideational or discursive meanings. From the viewpoint of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) adopted here, emotion is visible above all as an overlay on structures that communicate interpersonal and representational meanings. This is particularly apparent for ‘expletives’, words which are in themselves meaningless but ‘fill out’ the clause with an expression of emotion. This chapter focuses on the expletive use of fuck, fucking, fucking well and the fuck and their precisely delineable complementary syntactic distributions. The positioning of these expletives is identified for all types of syntactic phrase and nine kinds of pronoun, including the phenomenon of tmesis in, for example, im-fucking-possible. The items are identified as grammatical rather than lexical and as functioning as optional pragmatic markers, specifically as realizing an operator of emotional emphasis (EmoEmph) on Focused or Contrasted Subacts at FDG’s Interpersonal Level. This analysis is validated by examining the grammaticality or discourse-acceptability of all possible exceptions, and the repercussions are explored for the Morphosyntactic Level, where the syntactic distribution of the items is actually effected.