Nominal placeholders in Southern Cone Spanish

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.