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Factivity in exclamatives is a presupposition *
Author(s) -
Abels Klaus
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.2010.01164.x
Subject(s) - presupposition , citation , library science , computer science , philosophy , linguistics
This paper studies an aspect of the meaning of English examples of the type shown in (1), which belong to the class of wh-exclamatives. The examples in (1a) are unambiguously exclamative and do not correspond to wh-questions, (2). Whexclamatives have a lot of syntactic properties in common with wh-questions (Elliot (1971, 1974); Grimshaw (1979); Zanuttini and Portner (2003); d’Avis (2001); Castroviejo Miro (2006) among many others) although there is no subject-auxiliary inversion. In this paper, I will call clauses of this type what-a exclamative and Rett (2008) suggests tentatively that wh-exclamatives might be free relatives, which would explain the lack of subject-auxiliary inversion. A difficulty for this proposal not noted by Rett herself comes from the external distribution of sentences like (1a). If they were free relatives, they should be restricted to positions that accept NPs – a prediction that seems to be falsified by examples like the following.