The Structure and Meaning of Exclamatives: Based on Examples from Modern Polish

This article presents a semantic interpretation of exclamative constructions, based on examples from modern Polish. The author argues that there is a place for exclamative sentences in the syntactic subcode of natural language, alongside the more well-established declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentence types. She provides arguments against the scalar analysis of exclamatives. The similarity of exclamative constructions to questions, elliptical structures, incomplete utterances, and utterances with unclear reference is no accident, because exclamatives convey a tension between the speaker s knowledge about an entity attracting attention on the one hand, and the speaker s difficulty in verbalizing that knowledge on the other. The emotiveness or expressivity of exclamatives is here seen to be of a pragmatic nature, a derivative of their distinctive form (including their prosodic characteristics).