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Exploring Intensification: Synchronic, diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Maria Napoli and Miriam Ravetto
[Studies in Language Companion Series 189] 2017
► pp. 207–228

Chapter 10
English exclamative clauses and interrogative degree modification

| Universität Hamburg

I here explore the relationship between interrogative degree modification (What a mess!; How awful!) and exclamative clauses like What a wonderful conference we had or How wonderful this conference was. The former are usually viewed as derived from the latter by means of ellipsis. The ellipsis account is based on the prerogative of clausal over non-clausal structures, a silent assumption behind much of contemporary grammatical reasoning. My study provides quantitative evidence that this reasoning may well have to go into the opposite direction. It is based on the British National Corpus and the International Corpus of English, British Component.

Keywords: exclamations, exclamative clauses, degree modification, intensifiers, interrogative words
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Adverbial degree modification
  • 3.Degree modification with interrogative words
  • 4.Exclamative clauses in English
    • 4.1Clause types and illocutionary force
    • 4.2The syntax and semantics of exclamations
  • 5.The usage of English exclamative clauses
    • 5.1 What-exclamatives
    • 5.2 How-exclamatives
    • 5.3Exclamatives in ICE-GB
  • 6.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.189.11sie
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