Exclamative clauses in English

Abstract

This study aims to complement the theoretical and descriptive literature on exclamative clauses in English by providing a comprehensive description of their structural and semantic properties. The exclamative clause type, it is argued, must be restricted to constructions with an initial exclamative phrase containing what (as modifier) or how (as modifier or adjunct), insofar as it is only in these that the illocutionary force of exclamatory statement has been grammaticalised. A number of tendencies are revealed by the corpus-interrogation, including: the occurrence of ambiguity resulting from the structural similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses, especially in the case of subordinate exclamatives; the reduction of exclamative clauses—particularly what-exclamatives—to just the exclamative phrase; and, the relative favouring of how exclamatives in formal, written discourse.