On (Semantic) Pleonastic and Expletive Categories in Grammar: The Cases of Vocative Particles, Vocative Phrases, Coordination, Negation, and Clitics

This paper addresses the issue of (semantic) pleonastic—or expletive—categories in natural languages, with a focus on Italian, a language rich in such expressions. Pleonastic categories refer to elements that do not affect the truth-value conditions associated with a sentence. Examples include vocative particles, vocative phrases, coordination, expletive negations, and ethical datives. The paper presents a syntactic analysis showing that a “pleonastic/expletive” interpretation arises from a common structural configuration: these elements are directly merged in the complementizer domain (or higher), which prevents them from participating in the compositional semantics that determines propositional meaning. Instead, they contribute only to the interpretive layer, where discourse-level meanings are established. It follows that no truly semantically empty categories exist in the linguistic system; rather, their pleonastic or expletive semantics result from their syntactic configuration—and, in fact, they always retain some aspect of their original function.