‘Vá ver se eu estou lá na esquina’

The purpose of this paper is to discuss semantic and pragmatic aspects of name calling structures in the imperative form like ‘vá ver se eu estou lá na esquina’ (lit. ‘go see whether I’m at the corner of the street’), also known as “maledictions”. As speech acts which resemble at the surface form imperative sentences, we discuss semantic and pragmatic features of this kind of sentence to understand their grammatical behavior. Differently from other forms of name calling directed towards the hearer, like vocatives ‘seu burro’ (you moron), or predicates like ‘você é um idiota’ (you are an idiot), name calling in imperative form are rarely studied and mentioned in the literature. These sentences are classified in two sets: a) disphemics, formed by taboo expressions like ‘vai à merda’ (lit. go to shit); and b) idiomatics, formed by expressions which in general are metaphors for some activity that takes a lot of time, like ‘vai plantar batata’ (lit. ‘go plant potatoes’) or ‘vai pentear macaco’ (lit. ‘go comb monkeys’). Classifying this speech acts as expressive imperatives, from the contemporary view of Referential Semantics on the meaning of different kinds of sentences, we propose that its semantic expressive content is the speaker’s dissatisfaction, with ilocutionary force of “malediction” (the speaker wishes that something bad happens to the hearer), and in the pragmatic side these sentences add propositions to the speaker’s set of dissatisfactions, just like declarative sentences add propositions to the conversational background.