IUSS Linguistics Seminars – Xavier Villalba

Speaker: Xavier Villalba (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Title: Expletive complementizers and epistemicity in exclamatives and beyond

Date/time: Monday, June 22, 2026, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm 

Introduced by:
Andrea Moro & Matteo Greco (IUSS Pavia)

In this talk, Prof. Villalba will argue that the presence of expletive que/che is not a case of free optionality. Drawing on corpus data, he will show that Catalan and Italian strongly favor the presence of que/che in exclamative sentences, whereas its occurrence in Spanish is at best marginal. While expletive complementizers have often been analyzed as markers of sentence type (Force), he will explore the possibility that expletive que is evolving into an epistemic marker associated with mirative expressions, particularly in connection with contrasts between Catalan and Spanish that-exclamatives. He will further argue that this change is syntactically encoded through generation in JudgeP, following Krifka’s syntactization of speech acts, thus confirming a pattern already observed for other peripheral markers such as Spanish vaya (Real-Puigdollers et al. 2025), where pragmaticalization correlates with movement upward along the functional spine of the sentence.

Zoom link:
https://iusspavia.zoom.us/j/88315967813

University School for Advanced Studies IUSS – Pavia. Italy