Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Sadock and Zwicky (1985) define clause types as a pairing of grammatical form and conversational use.' In this paper we discuss exclamatives within the context of this notion of clause type. We argue that exclamatives are not a purely semantic or pragmatic category expressed by a variety of unrelated syntactic forms; rather, the diverse realizations of exclamatives all share certain syntactic characteristics. These represent the defining semantic properties of this clause type. Thus, ours is a study of the syntaxlsemantic interface and its application to the study of exclamatives, and to the notion of clause types more generally. The syntactic part of our claim is both interesting and difficult because of the diversity of forms which are plausibly to be categorized as exclamatives. Consider, for example:

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