Challenging exclamations!

This comment on Trotzke and Giannikadou’s target paper entitled “Exclamation, intensity, and emotive assertion” addresses the question as to how the balance between descriptive information and emotional expressivity in sentences like How hard John works! and John works so hard! is best conceptualized in a proper grammatical-pragmatic framework. Whereas T&G stress the primacy of the descriptive information, the present comment supports an alternative view, in which the expressive aspect of such utterances is ‘upgraded’. In terms of speech acts, T&G consider the utterance of such sentences as assertions, while they are conceived here, in line with tradition, as exclamations. For the proper modelling of the status of the constructions discussed, the importance of a clear distinction between describing and indicating emotions is stressed.