Expressing exclamatives in Malagasy

This paper explores the syntax and semantics of the exclamative clause type in the Austronesian language Malagasy. Cross-linguistic considerations, distributional facts, and language-internal morphosyntax provide evidence that Malagasy exclamatives are syntactically nominal. All exclamatives are noun phrases, as in the English The things that he says! Unlike English, Malagasy has no clausal exclamatives. Based on the Malagasy data, the paper proposes that the exclamative force of nominals, in Malagasy and other languages, is located in the determiner layer of the structure.