A Degree Account of Exclamatives

This distinction is based on the empirical observation that the latter are subject to two semantic restrictions not applicable to the former. The proposal is this: for the utterance of an exclamation to be expressively correct, its content must be salient, and the speaker must find this content surprising. For the utterance of an exclamative to be expressively correct, its content must additionally be about a degree, and that degree must exceed a contextually relevant standard. I account for this difference by proposing that proposition exclamations and exclamatives are expressed with two different illocutionary force operators. These operators have different domains (one is a function from propositions, the other from degree properties) but the same value (an expression of surprise). This view of exclamatives helps characterize the syntactic constructions used to express exclamatives (which on first glance do not appear to form a natural class). Exclamatives are additionally interesting because, as Milner (1978) and Gérard (1980) observe, they are different from any other expression because they can receive an extreme degree interpretation in the absence of overt degree morphology. The situation is even more compelling than this: as I argue, exclamatives must receive an ‘extreme degree’ interpretation. Although the discussion here bears quite a bit on what it means for an exclamative to force an ‘extreme degree’ reading, in the end I will have little to say about how this is so.