Pitch accent, focus, and the interpretation of non-wh exclamatives in French
This paper examines the cross-linguistic realization of the class of exclamatives in the Romance languages. I argue that, while the syntactic and semantic properties of exclamative sentences are usually viewed as being licensed by wh-morphology, other grammatical features such as f(ocus) marking may serve a similar purpose in the construction of exclamative meaning. In particular, I argue that exclamations with focused gradation quantifiers, such as the Québec French sentence J’ai vu un film ASSEZ bon! “I saw SUCH a good movie!” display many of the same semantic properties that have been observed with wh-exclamatives. I propose that the semantic content of this new type of exclamative is a gradation construction with an implicit threshold clause and focus on the quantifier. I propose that the exclamative operator binds the threshold yielding an extreme degree reading, and that the presence of this operator is licensed by the focus structure of the sentence.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
CASTROVIEJO, ELENA
2021.
Onwh-exclamatives and gradability: An argument from Romance.
Journal of Linguistics 57:1
► pp. 41 ff.
Badan, Linda & Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng
2015.
Exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics 24:4
► pp. 383 ff.
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