Exclamatives: Issues of syntax, logical form and interpretation

Abstract

In this article, we formulate a hypothesis about the interface conditions that regulate the interaction between the logical form of exclamative sentences (mediated by their syntax), and the semantics of the exclamative speech act. We argue that it is exactly these interface conditions that enable different kinds of exclamatives (belonging to different clause-types) to receive their fine-grained interpretation. Syntactically, the core of our proposal is that there are two sorts of activation of the degree-feature in the syntax of exclamatives, giving rise to two distinct syntactic dependencies, and that the so-called ‘nominal’ exclamatives correspond in fact to clausal structures. The overall picture combines empirical adequacy with theoretical elegance and parsimony, pointing to a new interesting dimension in the semantics of definite determiners and – more generally – maximality operators.