Remarks on the construction you won't believe who Ed has married

Abstract The subordinate ‘wh’ clause in examples like You won't believe who Ed has married is commonly analysed in the generative literature as exclamative in contrast to the interrogative of I wonder who Ed has married : the major sources are Elliott (1971, 1974) and Grimshaw (1979). This paper presents syntactic and semantic arguments for analysing the ‘wh’ clause as interrogative in both cases, and investigates the consequences of this for an account of complement selection.