exclamatives

[Dick Hudson]

A late addition to the discussion of exclamatives (e.g. What a big book!). A
well-known fact on the same low level as Paul Kay's: a closely related
construction involves HOW. 

(1) How awful!
(2) How (very) kind of you! 

Maybe these are fixed phrases now, as can be seen by the oddity of the
following:

(3) +How hot!            (+ for `archaic'?)
(4) +How awful it is!

The point of these examples is (a) they're not NPs, (b) although we
understand them as expressing something like a proposition (do we have a
clear enough definition of proposition to decide once and for all whether
they're real propositions?), it's normal to leave the proposition
unexpressed, for recovery from the context. 

Another oddity about all the patterns that have been discussed is that they
can be subordinated (like Paul Kay I seem to remember lots of discussion of
these things from the Golden Days of TG):

(5) John told us what a nice time he'd had.

But in subordinate contexts the exclamative has to be a whole clause:

(6) What a nice girl (she is)!
(7) John said what a nice girl *(she was).

This contrasts with wh-questions:

(8) Who (came)?
(9) I don't know who (came).

But coming back to HOW, in subordinate clauses it can (and of course must)
introduce a complete clause.

(10) John told us how nice *(she was).


Tricky, eh? Or am I missing some simplifying generalisation?
Richard Hudson
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
work phone +171 419 3152; work fax +171 383 4108
email dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk; web-site http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm