In defense of exclamatory force

This commentary paper is a response to the target article by Andreas Trotzke and Anastasia Giannakidou, who argue that neither exclamatives like How smart Anya is! , nor declarative exclamations like Anya is so smart! have a special, exclamatory illocutionary force, but instead are both semantically equivalent to declaratives that assert propositions about the speaker’s attitude like I am amazed at how smart Anya is with respect to not only their compositional structure, but even what is at-issue and what is presupposed. In this response, I defend a specific version of the more traditional view under which exclamatives express affect about presupposed content, declarative exclamations assert the content of the declarative with expression of affect “on the side”, and neither assert propositions about one’s attitude. I do so by challenging Trotzke and Giannakidou’s claims about the behavior of these different types of sentences in the discourse and by looking at a wider typology of exclamations within and across languages, with special focus on their prosody and more fine-grained aspects of meaning.