Abstract
This paper deals with the controversial connection between sentence type and illocutionary force. I focus on wh-configurations of the form How cool is that! and demonstrate that this recent phenomenon presents some interesting challenges to approaches that are concerned with the illocutionary potential of sentence forms. In particular, the exclamation component of How cool is that! cannot be derived from features of exclamative syntax, but rather is a cumulative effect of exclamative intonation, the respective adjective, and the degree reading of how. However, the V-to-C-movement property results in a special pragmatics that proper exclamatives (i.e., without V-to-C movement: How cool that is!) lack. I claim that How cool is that! asks for affirmation or objection on the part of the addressee, and that this addressee-oriented component is signaled by a dedicated class of modal particles in the German version(s) of How cool is that! To analyze these addressee-oriented exclamations (A-EXCs), I adopt a syntactic approach to the connection between sentence types and their potential illocutionary uses and thus argue that this connection is by no means arbitrary and unrestricted. I show that both the special pragmatic function of How cool is that! and the corresponding distribution of modal particles in the German counterparts can be accounted for by referring to a compositional conception of sentence-type meanings, and I hence disagree with recent approaches that deal with How cool is that! and its counterparts in German as constructions (i.e., arbitrary form-function mappings) only.
Highlights
In linguistic typology, a distinction is often made between so-called ‘major’ and ‘minor’ sentence types
After having discussed some general issues concerning the connection between sentence type and illocutionary form, I presented the new observation that utterances like English How cool is that! have a hybrid status: they function as both speaker-oriented exclamations and addressee-oriented questions
Drawing on cross-Germanic evidence from English and German, I specified their pragmatic contribution as addressee-oriented exclamation and labeled these wh-configurations with interrogative form as addressee-oriented exclamations (A-exclamation speech acts (EXC))
Summary
A distinction is often made between so-called ‘major’ and ‘minor’ sentence types. Given that exclamatives can be used as responses to information-seeking questions and feature assertive force, I hypothesize that a covert factive operator is too strong a claim and that exclamatives should better be analyzed as configurations featuring (i) declarative word order (lacking subject inversion) and (ii) conveying an all-focus interpretation. According to this perspective, exclamatives fall into one category with other declarative configurations that express surprise on the part of the speaker. The differences of the wh-constituents in the question and the exclamation reading of strings like How cool is that can be accounted for by referring to a general strategy of emphatization in the left periphery—and not by referring to a distinct feature of wh-exclamatives shared with A-EXCs
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