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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY
Edited by Lori Repetti and Francisco Ordóñez
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14] 2018
► pp. 293–307

Chapter 17
Romance evaluative que/che/să sentences as inverted optatives

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Romance exclamative sentences introduced by the conjunctions que (Spanish, French, Portuguese) and che (Italian) ‘that’ and the Romanian particle să plus a subjunctive verb can receive an evaluative meaning and express the speaker’s displeasure or discontent about the propositional content. This paper describes and analyzes their properties. I propose that Romance que/che/să evaluative sentences are expressive sentences that express the speaker’s emotion about a proposition. The proposition is compared with other salient alternative propositions according to an inverted bouletic scale, so that the proposition is the less desirable for the speaker. The main formal properties (mood and tense restrictions) and semantic properties (presupposition of factivity and negative evaluation of the proposition) of the sentences naturally follow from the analysis.

Keywords: evaluative, expressive, optatives, subjunctive, force, type-clause
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basic description of evaluative che/que/să romance sentences
    • 2.1The form of che/que/să-Evaluatives
    • 2.2Semantics and intonation of que/che/să-Evaluatives
    • 2.3Summary
  • 3.The analysis of que/che/să-Evaluatives as inverted optatives
    • 3.1The expressive nature of que/che/să-Evaluatives
    • 3.2The syntactic structure
    • 3.3Tense restrictions and the contribution of Mood
    • 3.4The factive presupposition and the subjunctive mood
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.14.17san
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