Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax–Semantics Interface

One central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less well-studied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamental syntactic components which identify a clause as exclamative, a factive and a Wh operator. These are crucial because they are responsible for two fundamental semantic properties characteristic of exclamatives, namely that they are factive and denote a set of alternative propositions. The force of exclamatives, which we characterize as ‘widening’, is derived indirectly, based on the semantic properties. 1 Exclamatives and the notion of Clause Type Sadock and Zwicky (1985) define clause types as a pairing of grammatical form and conversational use.1 In this paper we use this notion of clause type as we examine one of the less commonly discussed types, exclamatives. Within the class of exclamatives we include sentences like What a nice guy he is!, which associate a variety of syntactic features with a specific conversational use. In general, scholars have approached the characterization of clause types in a way which is very natural given a definition like Sadock & Zwicky’s: they ask how the conversational use is represented in ∗We have benefitted from discussion accompanying presentations of this work at Georgetown and Yale Universities, and the University of Padova. We are also grateful to the audiences at the Workshop on ‘Minimal Elements of Linguistic Variation’ in Paris, the Workshop on ‘Spoken and Written Texts’ at the Univeristy of Texas at Austin, the Going Romance conference at the University of Utrecht, and ZAS in Berlin. In particular, we would like to thank Héctor Campos, Ralph Fasold, Elena Herburger, Roumi Pancheva, Cecilia Poletto, Manuela Ambar, Hans Obenauer, Manfred Krifka, Larry Horn, Bob Frank, and the participants in our graduate seminars on clause types. We would like to extend our special thanks to Paola Benincà, both for providing all of the judgments and for extensive discussion of our ideas. This research was supported in part by a Georgetown University Graduate School summer grant. More precisely, the set of clause types within a language forms a closed system in that: 1. ‘There are sets of corresponding sentences, the members of which differ only in belonging to different types.’ 2. ‘The types are mutually exclusive, no sentence being simultaneously of two different types’ (Sadock & Zwicky 1985: 158).