On the Discourse Effects of wh-Exclamatives

Wh-exclamatives are, arguably, a formally individuated class of clauses that are conventionally associated with a particular use, on a par with declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives. The characteristics that set them apart formally have been discussed at length by Elliott (1974), Grimshaw (1979), Gutiérrez-Rexach (1996), among many others. In English, the most prominent property of matrix wh-exclamatives is that they can only be formed with how and what, which are the only wh-words that can get amount readings, referring to either an extent of a gradable property or a cardinality.1 In this paper, we are concerned with their conventional use.2 A sensible first step for investigating the conventionally determined use of wh-exclamatives is to determine what is conveyed by an exclamative utterance. Utterances of wh-exclamatives always convey two distinct implications, which we may call, following Castroviejo Miró (2008), the descriptive content and the expressive content. The descriptive content specifies that the described amount, which is determined compositionally from the make-up of the wh-clause, is high and this is presented as a true fact about the world. The expressive content is about an emotive attitude the speaker has towards the descriptive content. Examples of such attitudes include surprise, amazement, and awe, but their precise nature is not specified. The two implications are illustrated with the how-exclamative in (1):