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Article published In: Functions of Language
Vol. 27:2 (2020) ► pp.207–233

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On the status of wh-exclamatives in English

 | Universität zu Köln
 | University of Graz
 | Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf
Published online: 30 June 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.17028.hei
Abstract
Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of Discourse Grammar. It is argued that the structure of exclamatives can be related to other sentence types in terms of discourse strategies that are used for constructing texts, in particular by means of cooptation, a cognitive-communicative strategy that enables speakers to use existing text pieces for new discourse functions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The present paper
    • 1.2Sentence types
  • 2.Characteristics of exclamatives
    • 2.1Features
      • A.Exclamatives express the speaker’s affective response to a situation
      • B.The proposition expressed by exclamatives is factive
      • C.Exclamatives evoke a scalar property
      • D.Exclamatives cannot normally be negated (McCawley 1973; Olbertz 2012: 86–87)
      • E.The exclamatory force is anchored in the here and now of the situation of discourse
      • F.The wh-word is placed clause-initially
      • G.Exclamatives normally have subject-auxiliary order
      • H.Exclamatives have the morphosyntactic structure of insubordinate sentences
      • I.Exclamatives are syntactically unattached
      • J.Exclamatives occur frequently in reduced forms (Section 3.4)
    • 2.2Related constructions
      • 2.2.1Wh-questions
      • 2.2.2Complement wh-clauses
    • 2.3Exclamatives as a distinct sentence type
    • 2.4Thetical features
  • 3.From cooptation to insubordination
    • 3.1Cooptation
    • 3.2A reconstruction
    • 3.3A ubiquitous strategy
    • 3.4Reduced clauses: A problem for the cooptation hypothesis?
    • 3.5On subject-auxiliary inversion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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