How to Express Yourself: On the Discourse Effect of Wh-Exclamatives

Anna Chernilovskaya, Cleo Condoravdi, and Sven Lauer

Semantic theories of wh-exclamatives (Zanuttini and Portner (2003); Castroviejo Miró (2006); Rett (2011), a.o.) can only partially describe their pragmatic behaviour, which is different from assertions, questions, and imperatives. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we look at data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English to refine old and provide new observations about the discourse behaviour of wh-exclamatives, continuing the work in (Castroviejo Miró 2008). Second, we propose a definition of the exclamative speech act operator in the discourse model from (Farkas and Bruce, 2009) in a way that allows to characterise their discourse behaviour.

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