Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article takes stock of the comment que P structure. It gives an overview of interrogative structures in direct or indirect use, based on examples attested in several corpora of spontaneous speech. It shows that, towards the end of the twentieth century, there was a clear decline in the use of this structure in French in interrogatives. It seems that exclamatory use is less in decline. Analysis of the data for represented speech shows the informal nature of this structure, its decline in interrogatives, particularly indirect interrogatives, and suggests that the exclamative use is better preserved.

This paper introduces Exclamative Se Constructions (ESCs), analyzing their use in two Romance languages: Trevigiano, a northern Italian dialect, and Standard Italian. ESCs are used to express shock or surprise at someone’s statement and to challenge its accuracy. Although they resemble adverbial clauses, ESCs function autonomously as main clauses. I identify four defining properties of ESCs: adverbial clause form, form-function mismatch, main-clausality, and the anchoring of surprise to a preceding assertion rather than to the ESC’s own propositional content. I argue that ESCs function as counterarguments, specifically rebutting assumed premises using contextually relevant scales. These rebuttals consistently involve asserting a value that contrasts sharply with some initial statement, often reaching an extreme or unexpected point on the contextually relevant scale.

The present study explores the exclamative use of the feminine definite article la in structures such as ‘¡La de chicos que besé en la fiesta!’ (How many guys I kissed at the party!). First, a morphosyntactic description of the pattern is offered so as to show that the data under analysis are pseudopartitive constructions which display all the characteristics of primary and partial exclamatives. Building on research on nominal exclamatives, we conclude that these examples are not CPs but indefinite DPs with an exclamative flavor which contain a semi-relative clause introduced by que. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, we schematize a set of syntactic structures which capture the ‘chimeric’ and hybrid nature of the data, these being halfway between DPs and exclamative clauses. In order to do so, it will be necessary to split the DP into smaller projections (FocP, FinP), since la must move to Spec-FocP to be interpreted as an exclamative operator.

This paper reports on a study of the translation of English what and French quel exclamatives spoken in European Parliament proceedings into French and English respectively. It explores how these meaning-laden constructions are translated in practice as well as the translation of associated degree modifying and performative elements. This paper also argues that corpus-based translation studies can contribute to the debate surrounding the definition of the embedded (non-matrix) exclamatives and touches upon the comparative use of these exclamatives in the two languages.

This paper discusses a type of wh -exclamative whose wh -component and degree component do not seem to go hand in hand. These are wh -exclamatives in Catalan whose moved wh -phrase is headed by the determiner quin ‘what, which’, and whose NP contains an optional DegP headed by tan ‘so’ or més ‘more’. By taking a closer look at these wh -exclamatives, we will be able to contribute to the debate on the role of gradability and of the wh -component in the semantics of wh -exclamatives. My claim is that the DegP in these wh -exclamatives leaves behind a degree variable that is ultimately bound by an expressive speech act operator. Following Castroviejo (2006) and building on Rett (2009), I adhere to the claim that wh -exclamatives in Catalan are necessarily scalar as a requirement of the expressive operator. Moreover, as a downward-monotonic operator, I show that it licenses upward-directed inferences, which ensures that wh -exclamatives express unexpectedness toward a high degree.

The aim of this paper is empirical: it presents the geographical span of the so-called Doubly Filled Comp constructions in Gallo-romance dialects in the Atlas Linguistique de la France, i.e. constructions where an instance of que is followed by a WHphrase. The contexts under review are root WH-questions, free and bounded relative clauses, embedded exclamative clauses in comment ‘how’ and temporal clauses in quand ‘when’. Three local varieties of que are also examined: que following si ‘if’ in conditional clauses; the so-called Gascon enunciative particle; and doubled que in a Picard dialect. The geographical distribution of these various instances of que turns out to be largely restricted to (though not exclusive of) the Oïl area, though each construction may exhibit a different span.

This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like the meeting is (hereby) adjourned are purely performative updates that just enforce an index change on a context set. Assertions like the meeting is (already) adjourned are analyzed as combinations of a performative update that introduces a guarantee of the speaker for the truth of the proposition, and an informative update that restricts the context set so that this proposition is true. The first update is the illocutionary act characteristic for assertions; the second is the primary perlocutionary act, and is up for negotiations with the addressee. Several other speech acts will be discussed, in particular commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, and definitions, which are all performative, and differ from related assertions. The paper concludes a discussion of locutionary acts, which are modelled as index changers as well, and proposes a novel analysis for the performative marker hereby.

This paper attempts to demonstrate the existence of Korean degree what-exclamatives and to provide a precise characterization of them. Close investigation of Korean degree what-exclamatives offers an unusually rich set of linguistic diagnostics that we can use to investigate cross-linguistic variation in what-exclamatives. In analying wh-exclamatives, there is an ongoing debate in the literature as to whether the construction denotes a set of propositions or a degree property and whether it counts as an assertion or an expressive in terms of illocutionary force. This paper presents fresh insights into the aforementioned issues by suggesting that Korean degree what-exclamatives denote a maximal degree derived via a maximality operator ku/ilehkey ‘so’, and further that they have assertive speech acts. This view allows us to account for various regular as well as idiosyncratic properties of Korean degree what-exclamatives.

This paper argues for the recognition of mirativity in two Bantu languages: Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili. It shows that the two languages mark mirativity with lexical particles. Gĩkũyũ has kaĩ, githĩ, anga, ni, and otho, while Kiswahili uses kwani, mbona, kumbe, and si. The paper demonstrates that these particles are used when there is evidence that contradicts a speaker's epistemic knowledge. The particles express attitudes such as surprise, disbelief towards knowledge that is unexpected or that which contradicts a speaker's present state of knowledge or expectation. Mirative marking in the two languages depends on the availability of some sort of evidence, which shows the connection between evidentiality and mirativity in the languages. It is also evident the mirative particles in Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili share features of exclamative and interrogative illocutionary forces. However, the particles do not encode typical exclamatives. The resultant questions are content, polar, or rhetorical questions. Because the mirative particles in these languages represent a speaker's belief or interpretation of the world, they are speaker-oriented miratives.

Inverting wh-exclamative sentences with an overt complementizer in languages like Spanish pose a serious challenge to traditional accounts of obligatory subject-verb inversion. Such analyses assume either T-to-C movement or Spec,TP as an A-bar position capable of hosting wh-phrases and subjects alike. The optional presence of a complementizer in the head of CP in exclamatives prevents the verb from moving to CP, which argues against an analysis of inversion wherein the verb moves to Cº. Regarding the Spec,TP-as-an-A-bar-position account, if the wh-phrase sits in Spec,TP and competes with the subject for that position, the presence of a complementizer below wh-phrases in exclamatives is then rather mysterious, since que ‘that’ is standardly assumed to signal the presence of CP structure –not IP/TP structure. However, for those cases in which the complementizer occurs, a combined approach consisting of a modification of the Spec,TP-as-an-A-bar-position account which assumes further movement of the exclamative wh-phrase to a CP-related/left-peripheral projection headed by the complementizer is shown to be empirically superior to the competing proposals on the market. Furthermore, dialect data show that the presence of que is sensitive to the type of exclamative phrase in its specifier. The inverting exclamative data with overt que also indicate that it is the full projection consisting of the exclamative wh-phrase in the specifier plus the overt complementizer  in the head that needs to be adjacent to the verb in such environments.