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Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is an account of the semantics and pragmatics of exclamation. I focus on two key observations: first, that sentence exclamations like Wow, John bakes delicious desserts! and exclamatives like What delicious desserts John bakes! express that a particular proposition has violated the speaker’s expectations; and second, that exclamatives are semantically restricted in a way that sentence exclamations are not. In my account of these facts, I propose a characterization of illocutionary force of exclamation, a function from propositions to speech acts of exclamation. The difference in meaning between sentence exclamations and exclamatives has consequences for the type of violated expectation. I end with a comparison to some previous approaches and a tentative extension of parts of the analysis to other constructions.

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Correspondence to Jessica Rett.

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This work has had several previous incarnations and owes a great deal to those who have suffered through them: Mark Baker, Adrian Brasoveanu, Elena Castroviejo-Miro, Veneeta Dayal, Jane Grimshaw, Nathan Klinedinst, Angelika Kratzer, Eric McCready, Adam Sennet and audiences at Rutgers, SALT XVIII, UCLA, UCSC and UMass Amherst. A special thanks goes to Sam Cumming and Roger Schwarzschild. Thanks also to my anonymous L&P reviewers who have influenced the paper immensely.

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Rett, J. Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts. Linguist and Philos 34, 411–442 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-011-9103-8

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