expletive
a swear word- a semantically vacuous element which is invariable in form and acts as a placeholder for a specific position at phrase structure
During my postdoc at Ghent University, I joined forces with Kim Groothuis to explore the relation between expletives and discourse properties within Germanic, Romance and beyond.
In 2023 we convened a workshop on this topic at the SLE conference in Athens, which brought together researchers from diverse theoretical perspectives and linguistics traditions.
We are now working with our speakers on a special issue with the journal Linguistics.
We recently published a review article which critically surveyed the state-of-the-art on discourse-related expletives and discussed the main challenges and opportunities we see in this area.
We hope that the article will encourage more research in this rich area of linguistics.
Hannah Booth 