Exclamative clauses in English and their relevance for theories of clause types

Abstract

In the present study, I investigate the grammar and usage of English exclamative clauses of the typeWhat a wonderful journey this is!andHow wonderful this journey is!Building on existing research, I argue that the exclamative clause type can be motivated both syntactically and semantically/pragmatically. In the main part of my study, I offer a usage-based analysis of English exclamative clauses drawing on data from theBritish National Corpusand theInternational Corpus of English, British Component. I consider 703 tokens ofwhat-exclamatives and 645 tokens ofhow-exclamatives. My analysis reveals that English exclamatives typically occur in reduced form lacking an overt verbal predicate, i.e.What a wonderful journey!orHow wonderful!I provide an explanation for the predominance of reduced forms based on the semantico-pragmatic properties of exclamations. Moreover, I argue that the usage properties of exclamatives render it a marginal clause type, as it is highly infrequent and predominantly appears in non-clausal forms. Usage data point to a cline of clause types as the more appropriate approximation of reality instead of the familiar distinction between major and minor clause types.