Chapter published in:
Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 229–252

Chapter 8
NP exclamatives and focus

| University of Cologne

This paper makes a contribution to the study of Spanish noun phrase (NP) exclamatives, such as ¡Las tonterías que dicen! ‘The silly things they say!’. The main purpose is to explore the relation between NP exclamatives and the notion of focus. I compare NP exclamatives with canonical focus-marking constructions such as focus-fronting constructions and cleft sentences and show that they share some crucial syntactic and prosodic features. Elaborating on both the similarities and differences between these different constructions, I argue that NP exclamatives exhibit a special kind of focus that points not to the propositional content, but rather to the relation between the propositional content and the exclamative illocution. Making use of both focus theory and speech act theory, I claim that exclamative constructions express a non-contrastive focus that indicates the presence of non-fulfilled speaker expectations.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The structure of NP exclamatives
    • 2.1Two types of NP exclamatives
    • 2.2The macro-syntactic and prosodic structure of NP exclamatives
      • 2.2.1The macro-syntactic structure
      • 2.2.2The prosodic structure
  • 3.NP exclamatives, clefts, and focus-fronting constructions
    • 3.1NP exclamatives and clefts
    • 3.2NP exclamatives and focus-fronting constructions
  • 4.Exclamative NPs and focus
    • 4.1Focus and domain widening
    • 4.2Focus and illocutionary force
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.08gar
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