What is it about?
This paper looks at an unusual feature of Catalan and Spanish: some words that originally referred to specific people can now be used in everyday speech to mean something like “nobody at all,” often with an expressive or emphatic tone. One common example of such a proper noun behaving this way in Catalan and Spanish is Rita (originally referring to a famous flamenco singer). To explore the phenomenon, I conducted a survey with 460 Catalan speakers, asking them to judge different sentences containing Rita. The results show that speakers do not all use it in the same way. Instead, there are several distinct patterns: some speakers only accept Rita in certain kinds of sentences, while others use it much more broadly. The findings suggest that Rita is in the process of changing from a prototypical proper name into a special kind of grammatical word with a negative meaning.
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Why is it important?
This study shows how language can turn personal names into new grammatical tools. The development of proper nouns into grammaticalised forms of negation had not been previously noted. Understanding how forms like Rita develop helps linguists learn more about how grammar changes over time and how speakers create expressive ways of emphasising meaning. More broadly, the research contributes to our knowledge of how languages build systems for expressing negation and emphasis, and how new grammatical categories can emerge from everyday speech. In particular, it also underscores the importance of Catalan and Spanish culture in the development of language: the name “Rita (la Cantaora)” makes reference to a very famous 19th century flamenco singer!
Perspectives
I was struck by this phenomenon because it turns something very familiar, a singer's name, into a vivid way of expressing negation or negative-like meanings. In Catalan and Spanish, some speakers can say sentences like “Això ho farà Rita!” or “Esto lo hará Rita!” (literally “Rita will do this”) to mean something like “There's no way anyone will do this!” or “I won't do this! (Find someone else!)”. The effect is strongly expressive and often humorous or emphatic. Yet it behaves in systematic grammatical ways. Seeing a proper name used like this raises interesting (and very fun) questions: how does a name come to function almost like “nobody”? Why do some speakers accept it in many contexts while others do not? How is spoken, colloquial language grammatically encoded? I hope this paper helps document and better understand this striking expressive strategy in Catalan and Spanish, and sheds light on how such forms may emerge as languages develop new ways of expressing negation and emphasis. It was great fun to research this, I hope readers enjoy learning about Rita!
Núria Bosch
University of Cambridge
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Rise of Expressive Negation in a Proper Noun: Survey Evidence from Catalan on Rita, February 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004749917_009.
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