Talk:Expletive (linguistics)

March 2022
"This bloody thing is shit, hey" – this is not a very fortunate example, and is not taken from a linguistic source. I somewhat amended it ("bloody" is certainly not an expletive in the grammatical sense of the term) but I suggest it should be replaced by a better one. Robin.r (talk) 07:54, 4 March 2022 (UTC)


 * An expletive (as I understand and use the term) is an element that does not fill a syntactic role or contribute to referential meaning. In "The bloody thing is shit, hey," bloody could well be an expletive (if, for example, "The thing is shit, hey," would have the same meaning in the same circumstance). But I agree that the example is a poor one, as it is possible that bloody could fill some role, as for example referring to literal blood, or perhaps differentiating "the bloody thing" from some other "thing" established in earlier context. Cnilep (talk) 06:12, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
 * No, I made a bit of a hash of that explanation. A syntactic expletive does fill a syntactic role, but does not contribute referential meaning, as in "It is raining." Cnilep (talk) 23:29, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 26 April 2022

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Move to Expletive (linguistics) and replace with disambiguation. The only question here was redirect vs disambiguation. There wasn't enough discussion on that to call a consensus, but moving the disambiguation page to Expletive had more support and represents less of a change since it doesn't completely change the primary topic. Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:38, 16 May 2022 (UTC) Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:38, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Expletive → Expletive (linguistics) – Doubting if the linguistics concept is primary over profanity. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 21:53, 26 April 2022 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support Per nom, but move disambiguation page to primary per WP:NOPRIMARY rather than redirecting it to profanity. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 22:37, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Agreed that there is no primary topic. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 01:27, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Support replace with the dismabiguation page at the base name -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 01:44, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Support. I think this could be a primary redirect for profanity, but I'm fine with making it a disambiguation page. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:51, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Merge? Concept dab? Maybe? Red   Slash  16:50, 4 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Support and primary redirect to Profanity. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:11, 5 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Support and redirect - I was considering closing this one but I noticed that we were split on dab vs redirect. After looking at the 14 mainspace pages that link to Expletive, it seems as if they are referring to profanity. Based on that, a redirect and hatnotes explaining the difference might be sufficient. ASUKITE 20:43, 5 May 2022 (UTC)
 * "Profanity" is a major section of this article. Is this not being treated as a catch-all article already? Dekimasu よ! 04:23, 7 May 2022 (UTC)
 * That section has no place here, as profanity (being offensive language) has virtually nothing to do with the linguistics concept other than being called the same name. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 16:00, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Support and dabify. Even though the term is more commonly used to refer to profanity than the grammatical concept, 1) I'm not convinced the margin is sufficient to establish a primary topic. 2) When considering titles and primariness, I think it makes sense to give additional weight to formal writing about the topics at hand rather than colloquial usage. For example, if you looked at all uses of the word "sex", you might find it most commonly refers to sexual intercourse, but we don't make that term a primary redirect to that article because we give more weight to what things are called in formal, scholarly writing, rather than everyday speech. Colin M (talk) 19:56, 15 May 2022 (UTC)