Catalan 'Déu n'hido' and Levels of Meaning in Exclamatives

This paper has two main goals. The first goal is to present a formal semantic analysis of the Catalan interjection ‘Deu n’hi do’ (DND, henceforth). The second goal of the paper is to explore the relationship between DND and exclamative sentences. The study of DND sheds some light on the semantic properties of exclamatives. It provides evidence for the existence of different levels of meaning in exclamatives, which is something impossible to test for without this sort of particle. Namely, DND provides evidence for a conventional implicature in the meaning of exclamatives. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the syntactic distribution of DND; Section 3 presents background about previous claims about DND in the literature and the semantics of exclamatives; Section 4 presents the main differences between bare-exclamatives and DND-clauses; Section 5 presents a tentative analysis of DND, from which some puzzles arise; Section 6 presents evidence for different levels of meaning in exclamatives, using DND-clauses as evidence and solving the puzzles presented in Section 5. Section 7 concludes.