The Indefinite Article with Proper Names: The Semantic Effect of Evaluation

The subject of this study is the phenomenon of occasional use of the Spanish indefinite article with anthroponyms and the semantic effect of subjective evaluation it produces. Unlike previous studies that emphasized isolated stylistic cases, this article offers a comprehensive analysis of the mechanism as a systemic linguistic phenomenon. The research methodology is based on a combined application of descriptive and contrastive-descriptive methods within the framework of Guillaume’s psychomechanics of language. This approach makes it possible to analyze the linguistic material not as a series of exceptions but as the outcome of mental operations of actualization governed by the vector of extensivity/anti-extensivity. The practical analysis is carried out on a representative corpus of examples drawn from contemporary Spanish-language media, literary texts, and journalistic discourse. The novelty of the study lies in its proposal of a unified explanation of three types of evaluative meanings (referential-indefinite, metaphorical-typifying, and situational-role) through the prism of the anti-extensive function of the article in Guillaume’s system. This perspective reveals the underlying mechanisms of the transition of a proper name as an asemanteme into the status of a semanteme, a phenomenon that has not been given comparable attention in previous works, which often limited themselves to merely acknowledging the fact of antonomasia. The main findings of the research may be summarized as follows: the indefinite article functions as a grammatical operator that suspends the uniqueness of the referent and initiates a process of categorization, which serves as the basis for evaluation. Thus, the analysis of specific corpus examples confirms that the evaluative effect is systematically generated by a shift in the referential status of the name. The author’s distinctive contribution is to demonstrate that this phenomenon should not be regarded as a stylistic accident but rather as a regular instrument of expressive syntax, which is of relevance both for linguistic theory and for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.

Spanish language, Indefinite article, Semantics, Article, Anthroponyms, Psychosystematics, Grammaticalization, Actualization, Determiner, Anti-extensive article