‘You bastard’ is insulting because ‘bastard’ is an expletive, but what’s wrong with ‘You Hoboken’ or ‘You big wet noodle’? This paper explores the semantics of a vocative construction that is particularly efficient at coining what I call ‘expressive labels’; these are affect-transmitting expressions that present themselves as apt for identifying their discourse target via speaker affect. Building on work by Portner (in Schwab and Winkler (eds) On information structure, meaning and form. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007) and Gutzmann (The grammar of expressivity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019), I show how discourse properties direct and constrain the conversion to expressive label, and offer a semantics for this construction that unifies these cases with more conventional evaluative vocatives, like ‘you bastard’.

“你这个混蛋”是侮辱性的，因为“混蛋”是一个咒骂，但“你霍博肯”或“你这个大湿面条”有什么问题？这篇论文探讨了呼唤结构的语义，这种结构在创造我所谓的“表达标签”方面特别有效；这些是表达情感的表达方式，它们表现为易于通过说话者的情感来识别其话语目标。基于 Portner（在 Schwab 和 Winkler (eds) On information structure, mean and form. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007）和 Gutzmann（表达性的语法，牛津大学出版社，牛津，2019）的工作，我展示了话语属性是如何指导的并限制对表达标签的转换，并为这种结构提供语义，将这些情况与更传统的评价呼唤统一起来，比如“你这个混蛋”。