Commentary examines the hypothesis that exclamatives combine three sentence types with intensity, suggesting a new view on emotive predicates.
Trotzke and Giannakidou advance the strong hypothesis that exclamative sentences and exclamations can be reduced to a combination of three basic sentence-types (declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives) with added intensity for emphasis. Moreover, they give convincing arguments for treating root exclamatives as clauses subordinated to an emotive predicate. In this commentary I briefly evaluate such claims on empirical and theoretical grounds.
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Xavier Villalba (2025) studied this question.
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