The Semantics of Nominal Exclamatives

(1) is a noun phrase, and thus contrasts syntactically with (2), which is a clause. Yet the two seem to be synonymous. We will argue that the noun phrase is not embedded in an elliptical structure; rather, the phrase we see is all there is. And furthermore we will argue that (1) is not just pragmatically equivalent to (2); the two are in fact semantically equivalent as well. This raises the question, of central concern to this volume, of how a noun phrase achieves such a clause-like function.