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A recognition of general properties of categorization can be used to illuminate the functional underpinnings of aspects of grammar that appear at first to be arbitrary syntactic facts. One such case, that of Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI) is investigated in this chapter which builds on previous accounts that have offered insightful generalizations about the function of SAI constructions. It is argued that a case that is apparently somewhat exceptional — that of exclamatives — is actually strongly motivated as well. Formal restrictions on SAI are addressed and accounted for by a functional account. The implication of this work is that synchronic functional motivations often lurk behind seemingly syntactic brute facts, and can be used to explain many aspects of grammar that appear otherwise to be wholly idiosyncratic.

On the basis of evidence from German and Italian, it is argued that non-canonical wh-questions and wh-exclamatives involve the expression of surprise about an unexpected state of affairs; however, they exhibit a difference in illocutionary force: while non-canonical questions constitute directive speech acts which request the hearer to provide an explanation for the unexpected state of affairs, wh-exclamatives are more akin to assertions, since they are used to indicate the speaker’s surprise about the difference between the expected state of affairs and the actual one. These interpretive differences are syntactically codified by the presence and absence of Verb Second in German and by a difference in the final landing site of the wh-element in standard questions, non-canonical questions, and wh-exclamatives in Italian.

In this chapter, the expressive speech act of so-called ‘that-exclamatives’ is compared in both Germanic and Romance languages. The chapter first points out important semantic differences between that-exclamatives in the two language groups by mainly focusing on the languages Catalan and German. In order to explain those differences, a detailed syntactic account is provided of the different systems of syntactic complementation in the expression of that-exclamatives in Germanic and Romance languages. The conclusion of the chapter is that only German that-exclamatives can be referred to as cases of so-called ‘insubordination’ (i.e., syntactic configurations that feature subordinated syntax, but are used as root clauses), whereas Catalan that-exclamatives instantiate a syntactic form that is distinct from both wh-exclamatives and subordinated syntactic configurations.

There is a strong and vocal tradition of expressives being characterized as denoting conventional implicatures (Potts 2005 et seq.), and some have taken the category of expressives to include exclamation (Zimmermann 2007). But there’s also a tradition of analyzing exclamations and other mirativity markers at the illocutionary or speech-act level (Sadock and Zwicky 1985; Faller 2002; Rett 2011). In this chapter, I address two related questions: What, if any, are the empirical differences between expressives and miratives? And what, if any, are the theoretical differences between conventional implicatures and illocutionary content? Ultimately, I initiate a turf war over expressives: I argue that while they were initially characterized as a subtype of conventional implicature, they are more naturally grouped with emotive, or illocutionary, content.

This chapter is an in-depth study of the New England So AUXn’t NP/DP (SAND) construction, in which a sentence like so aren’t you is truth-conditionally identical to so are you (= “You are too”). The SAND construction, which is geographically restricted, is compared to geographically widespread negative exclamatives such as Aren’t you cute! Negative exclamatives, like SAND, have a negative marker but affirmative meaning (≈ “You are very cute”). This chapter shows that these cases fail negation tests but proposes that n’t is nevertheless not a semantically vacuous morphological marking. Instead, it serves a systematic syntactic and semantic function, one that explains pragmatic constraints on such sentences. Both SAND and negative exclamatives involve double negation, which is achieved by syntactically constructing a question-answer pair clause-internally.

The earliest unambiguous evidence for grammatical šī in Arabic comes in a few instances of an indefinite determiner and negator šī in the vernacular poetry and folk proverbs of Arab Spain (al-Andalus), evidence for a copular interrogative formed with a suffixed -š also appearing in two places. Conventionally and mistakenly interpreted as negators, these would show the operation of a Jespersen’s Cycle in Andalusi Arabic. Considering them in the context of exclamatives and rhetorically negative questions in living Arabic dialects and in their indigenous setting allows us to draw a different conclusion: negating with -š began when interrogatives formed with reflexes of šī were negated with mā, thus permitting their reanalysis as negators, even as they retained the post-positive -š of interrogation.

This chapter extends the analysis of insincere language use from the last chapter to non-declarative utterances, including imperative, interrogative, and exclamative utterances. It argues that such utterances communicate information about the speaker’s attitudes. The chapter offers an account of insincerity in the non-declarative realm that is shallow. On this view, a non-declarative utterance is insincere when it is made without a conscious intention to avoid communicating information not matching the speaker’s conscious attitudes. A notion of a communicative act is defined, and the chapter argues that only such acts can be evaluated as insincere or not. A framework for understanding the semantics and pragmatics of non-declarative clause types is sketched and the chapter shows how it explains why non-declaratives cannot be used to lie.