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Degree and exclamatives
Agnès Celle, Université Paris Diderot
Journée Agrégation Option C, l'expression du Degré, Université de Bordeaux 3, 24/1/2014
How to define exclamatives? How are they related to high degree? Are all exclamative
constructions related to degree? The definition of exclamatives raises a lot of questions :
« Il s’agit bien d’assertives, mais avec un quelque chose en plus qui se marque par des
procédés divers, lexicaux, prosodiques, syntaxiques. On les rapproche des emphatiques, des
interrogatives, sans plus. On parle à leur propos de syntaxe affective, de sentiment vif
devant un événement, d’expressivité, on dit qu’elles expriment le haut degré. » (Culioli
1974 : 6)
Crosslinguistically, it has been shown that exclamative constructions are characterized by the
presence of interrogative words and anaphoric degree adverbs (Michaelis 2001). Several
authors also distinguish between two types of exclamative constructions: degree
exclamative constructions and non degree exclamative constructions. This distinction only
partially overlaps with the distinction between exclamatives and exclamations made among
others by Huddleston and Pullum (2002). Huddleston and Pullum restrict exclamatives to
how and what clauses (in yellow below). However, both exclamatives and exclamations are
concerned with degree, even if, as pointed out by Milner (1978: 253), they lack an overt
degree morphology. The following provisional definition is based on negative criteria:
"Sera considérée comme exclamative une structure qui signifie le haut degré, en l’absence
des marqueurs spécifiques de cette catégorie sémantique, et en présence de marqueurs
dotés des deux caractères suivants:
-
Ce sont des marqueurs syntaxiques sans contenu sémantique ;
Ils apparaissent dans des contextes autres qu’exclamatifs." (Milner 1978, 253-254)
1. The difference between scalar and non-scalar exclamations
Martin (1987: 97-106) and Rett (2011) make a similar distinction between two types of
exclamative constructions in French and English.
Exclamation non graduelle
Il est là !
exclamation graduelle
Qu’elle est charmante ! *Qu’il est isocèle !
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Moi renoncer à mon projet !
Comme elle est belle ! *Comme il est
isocèle !
Elle a un (de ces) courage(s) !
Le chapeau (qu’elle a) !
Martin (1987 : 100-102)
« On voit ce qui distingue les deux types d’exclamatives : dans l’un, la vérité est assertée
avec la force de l’évidence ; dans l’autre, le parcours des possibles confirme la vérité jusque
dans les cas extrêmes. Dans les deux, une tension contradictoire oppose l’univers actuel de
celui qui parle à une image d’univers où p est possiblement faux. » Martin (1987 : 106)
Sentence
exclamation
=
declarative Exclamatives
sentence non-scalar expectation
scalar expectation
(Wow,) John bakes delicious desserts!
wh-exclamative: (My,) What delicious
desserts John bakes!
inversion exclamative: (Boy,) Does John bake
delicious desserts!
Nominal exclamative: (My,) The delicious
desserts John bakes!
Rett (2011: 412)
According to Rett, any exclamative construction is an expression of expectation violation.
The difference between sentence exclamations and exclamatives is as follows:
“[…] while an utterance of the sentence exclamation (Wow,) John bakes delicious desserts!
expresses that the speaker had expected that John wouldn’t have baked delicious desserts,
utterances of the exclamatives […] express that the speaker had expected that the desserts
John bakes wouldn’t be as delicious as they are. That is, while the sentence exclamation
seems to be associated with a non-scalar expectation (that the desserts John bakes would
not be delicious), the exclamatives seem to be associated with a scalar expectation (that the
desserts John bakes would not be as delicious as they are).” (Rett 2011: 413-414)
Interestingly, Martin and Rett make similar distinctions but account for them in a different
way. While Martin relies on a possible world theory, Rett shifts the focus to the speaker’s
expectations. In a similar vein, Michaelis (2001: 1039) highlights the speaker’s judgment that
underlies any exclamation. She argues that exclamations express surprise. We agree with
her that surprise “entails a judgment by the speaker that the situation is noncanonical.” This
judgment is common to both kinds of exclamations. It may be accompanied by interjections,
discourse markers and any other expressive devices.
Now the difference in terms of degree is correlated to another distinctive feature: in Rett’s
theory, the utterance of a sentence exclamation counts as an assertion, in contrast to
exclamatives. Evidence supporting this distinction is provided by the possibility of denial. It is
possible for the hearer to deny a sentence exclamation, whereas it is not possible to do so
with exclamatives:
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(1) A (Wow,) John bakes delicious desserts!
B No (he doesn’t), these are store-bought. John’s actually a terrible cook. (Rett)
(2) A. (My,) What delicious desserts John bakes! / (Boy,) Does John bake delicious
desserts! / (My,) The delicious desserts John bakes!
B. ?No (he doesn’t), these are store-bought. John’s actually a terrible cook. (Rett
2011)
It has been noted that exclamatives and interrogatives share a number of features, among
which the fronting of a non-subject wh-phrase. However, exclamatives can only be formed
with what and how. Other interrogative words (who, where, when, why) cannot be used in
exclamatives because they cannot express degree.
(3) A. How (very) short your children are!
B. How (very) few papers you’ve written!
C. What mean neighbours you have!
D. *Who that lovely woman married! (… He’s so acerbic!)
E. *Where she goes out partying! (… It’s so seedy!)
F. *When she gets out of bed in the morning! (… I eat lunch at that hour!)
G. *Why she dropped out of college! (… Her cat isn’t that lonely!) (Rett 2011, 417)
Rett’s claim (2011: 413) is that “the wh-phrases that are acceptable in exclamatives are
those which can range over degrees (while those which are unacceptable range over
individuals, times, etc.)”.
2. What
In exclamatives, what is usually regarded as an adjective. It functions as a modifier in a NP
structure.
(4) Oh, boy. Oh boy, I'll tell you, what a day!
(5) Grandmother, what big teeth you have!
(6) What damage she can do!
The vast majority of what-exclamatives are followed by a count noun as in (4) and (5),
predominantly singular as in (4). A lot of what exclamatives are elliptical noun phrases as in
(4).
Exclamative what differs from interrogative what, which functions as a determiner: What
day is this? What big teeth do you have? What damage can she do?
The most striking difference between exclamative what and interrogative what is one of
degree. Interrogative what is concerned with identification, whereas exclamative what is
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concerned with degree. Depending on the context, (4) might be paraphrased with what an
incredible / remarkable / extraordinary day! In contrast, interrogative what (what day?)
would be concerned with the identification of a day: Monday, as opposed to Tuesday or any
other day.
Similarly, in (5), exclamative what is concerned with the unusual degree of bigness
associated with the teeth. Interrogative what would be concerned with the identity of the
big teeth in question (eye tooth, molar, etc.). In (6), exclamative what implies high degree
(i.e. what extraordinary damage she can do!) whereas interrogative what ranges over every
kind of damage (what (kind of) damage can she do?).
In addition, Rett shows that exclamative what can only range over degrees, whereas
interrogative what can range over individuals. She illustrates this with the following
examples:
(7) What (peppers) did John eat?
I want to eat what John ate. (Rett 2011: 417)
In the fused relative as well as in the question, what ranges over entities – i.e. the things that
John ate.
In (8), Rett argues that it is possible to exclaim that John ate peppers A, B and C as opposed
to peppers E, D and F.
(8) (My,) What peppers John ate! (Rett 2011: 418)
Peppers being spicy, the degree interpretation is still possible: the peppers that John ate
exceed the degree of spiciness expected.
Rett points out that exclamative what is not felicitous in a context where a degree reading
cannot be recovered. For example, if John baked a chocolate cake and an apple pie although
he was told to bake a pumkin pie and a crème brûlée, the speaker's expectations are
violated. In that case, the utterance in (9) is not felicitous:
(9)  (My,) What desserts John baked! (Rett 2011: 418)
A sentence exclamation would be felicitous here: Wow, John baked those desserts! to
indicate that it is the set of desserts baked by John that violates the speaker’s expectations.
However, the utterance of (9) is felicitous if it can be associated with a gradable property: it
can be used to exclaim that the quality of the cakes baked by John exceeds the speaker’s
expectations, either if the cakes are delicious beyond the speaker’s expectations or if they
are bad beyond the speaker’s expectations. In the following examples, exclamative what
clearly ranges over the degrees associated with the gradable adjectives:
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(10)
I could also work on why I say such stupid things about women, that women
are all the same, what a stupid thing to say!
(11)
What an interesting tea we have had!
The exclamation is about the degree to which the thing in question instantiates the property
“stupid” in (10), about the degree to which the tea instantiates the property “interesting” in
(11). In Rett’s words, exclamative what does not express something about the individual
itself, here something or some tea. What can range over degrees in exclamatives, and it can
pick up any gradable property in the context to receive degree interpretation even in the
absence of degree morphology as in (8).
3. HOW
How can be used in exclamatives either as a modifier or as an adjunct. It expresses degree in
both cases. In the following examples, how modifies an adjective. Like what, it can occur in
elliptical utterances as in (13):
(12) You didn't even come to the funeral. I thought, ‘How angry he must be. He didn't even
come to David's funeral.’
(13) ‘My stomach aches.’
‘How convenient!’
Amy gets these perfectly timed stomachaches.
(14) How very tactful he is! (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 919)
It is generally taken for granted that how can also be used in questions about degree. In (12),
(13) and (14), theoretically, the interrogative counterpart is How angry is he / must he be?
How convenient is it? How tactful is he? However, there is no interrogative counterpart for
exclamative how when it modifies another degree modifier such as very or remarkably.
The formal parallel between exclamative and interrogative how is illustrated by several
syntactic features (see Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 919). However, in language use, howquestions are not necessarily about degree. Typically, interrogative how is combined with
adjectives like tall, big or old. The answer that is expected to be supplied by the hearer is
more likely to be numerical. It may provide information about age, size or height.
(15) a. How old is Jane?
She is ten years old.
(15) b. How old she is!
The answer in (15a) expresses measure, not degree. It is therefore questionable whether the
how-question is about degree. In addition, while some high degree of oldness is
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presupposed in (15 b), (15a) is simply a question about age and does not presuppose that
Jane has reached a high degree on the scale of age. As pointed out by Bolinger (1972: 155),
degree adjectives can be used relatively – rather than positively - in how-questions. As for
the answer in (15a), we argue that it is a measure expression. Numerical accuracy does not
involve degree. On this we disagree with Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 919) and with Collins
(2005: 5).
In light of this, (14) does not look like an exception in the paradigm. (14) is undoubtedly
about degree since how modifies a degree modifier. But the interrogative counterpart only
involves relative degree, in contrast to the exclamative.
The following example is formally ambiguous because of subject-auxiliary inversion – word
order in (16) is the same as in a question and the utterance ends with a question mark, not
an exclamation mark:
(16) What a coincidence it is to meet like this, I thought to myself, how stupid is this, dying
on the street like roadkill outside your therapist's office?
However, both right dislocation and the use of an evaluative adjective tend to indicate that
the speaker is exclaiming about the degree of stupidity associated with the situation rather
than trying to identify the degree of stupidity.
The use of how as an adjunct is illustrated in the following example:
(17) You know, I spent a lot of time watching your turtle. I thought..."How he carries that
house on his back wherever he goes!" That's why turtles are so slow.
(17’)  How does he carry that house on his back ?
Here again, exclamative how is concerned with degree: “how he carries that house to an
extraordinary degree wherever he goes”. Interrogative how in (17’) can only express manner
or means: “In what manner does he carry that house on his back?”
4. Embedded exclamatives
On the basis of a corpus study, Collins (2005) notes that what-exclamatives occur mainly as
main clauses, whereas how-exclamatives occur mainly as embedded clauses. The most
common functions of embedded exclamatives are object of verb and complement of
preposition. But they may also be extraposed subject, noun complement, adjective
complement and subject.
Most linguists define embedded exclamatives as a subclass of exclamations. Given that they
can be embedded under predicates such as be amazing or be surprised, some accounts of
wh-exclamatives even assimilate them to exclamatives (see Zanuttini & Portner). This
position is criticized by Rett for two reasons. First, even if such predicates encode surprise
lexically, they assert surprise but do not express surprise. The expressive function of
exclamatives is lost if exclamative clauses are embedded under these predicates.
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(18) A. I'm surprised by how much effort you put into showing your contempt for this
process.
B. Yes, you sound shocked.
Surprise can be agreed with in (18), where it is part of an assertion. Contrast with (19):
(19) A. He says he loves me. What a fucking retard!
B. #Yes, you sound shocked.
In (19), surprise is expressed by the exclamative but it is not asserted. It is not possible for
speaker B to confirm speaker A’s emotional state.
In addition, as pointed out by Rett and Zanuttini & Portner, any wh-clause can be embedded
after surprise predicates, not just what and how clauses. All wh-phrases that occur in
interrogatives may also occur in embedded clausal exclamatives. We do not regard these
clauses as exclamatives because they are compatible with any wh-phrase and not only with
the two ones that allow ranging over degrees:
(20) a. It’s amazing who/what/what book she saw.
b. It’s amazing why she did what she did.
c. It’s amazing how tall she is.
d. It’s amazing how quickly she reads. (Zanuttini & Portner)
However, real embedded exclamatives seem to exhibit the same morphology as
exclamatives:
(21) I was really surprised at how warm it felt.
(21’) How warm it feels!
(18) I'm surprised by how much effort you put into showing your contempt for this process.
(18’) How much effort you put into showing your contempt for this process!
The interpretation of embedded wh-clauses under verbs of knowing is also ambiguous
between an interrogative or an exclamative reading:
(22) I keep forgetting how (very) small this town is.
(23) Why... why do you keep saying that? What haven't you told me? You knew how (very)
depressed Mom was.
(24) I took one look at that kid's face, and I knew what a disaster all this was gonna be.
(22) may be interpreted as an embedded interrogative about the size of the town. If very is
added, the interpretation is unambiguously exclamative and the utterance is concerned with
the degree of smallness.
With know as a main verb in (23), the exclamative reading is favoured by factivity. Here
again, modification with very excludes the interrogative interpretation.
In (24), what a disaster, with the indefinite article, is exclamative. A question about the
identity of some disaster would not allow the indefinite article.
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5. Degree in exclamations
Unlike exclamatives, sentence exclamations are not necessarily concerned with degree. They are
compatible with degree, but unlike exclamatives, they require degree modifiers to express degree.
Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 923) clearly regard such utterances as not exclamative. In contrast to
what and how, so and such need not be fronted. They can occur in imperatives (e.g. Don't be so
messy!) as well as in interrogatives (e.g. Why did you make such a mess?).
Strikingly, the only degree modifiers that may occur in sentence exclamations are so and such. Very is
not acceptable in exclamations. Very does not collocate with interjections and matrix predicates (I
can’t believe) which express the speaker’s affective stance.
(25) God, your teeth are so big!
(25’) *Yuck, your teeth are very big!
(26) Yuck, Grandmother has such big teeth!
(26’) *Yuck, Grandmother has very big teeth!
(27) I can’t believe it’s so hot! (Michaelis 2001: 1041)
(27’) ?? I can’t believe it’s very hot!
As observed by Michaelis (2001) and Gilbert (2004), so and such are cataphoric degree modifiers, a
feature that is not shared by very:
(28)
I almost fainted, the sun was so hot!
*I almost fainted, the sun was very hot. (Michaelis 2001, 1041)
The resultative clause I almost fainted is cataphorically connected to the high degree expressed by so
hot. In the absence of such an anaphoric / cataphoric relation, as in (25) to (27), it is not possible to
recover a scale from the context. High degree results from self-identification. Degree can only be
defined in a circular way: “I can’t believe it is hot as it is, your teeth are big as they are”.
Note also that only the degree reading is possible with such and so in an exclamatory context.
Concluding remarks: We have brought to light three different ways of expressing high degree:
-
Very: very is a degree modifier; very refers to the typical characteristics of a notion; the sun is
very hot = what we call hot; very old = what everyone considers old; there is minimum
agreement among speakers on the objective definition of a prototype for hotness or oldness.
Very is not acceptable in exclamations, but perfectly possible in exclamatives once ranging
over degrees has been marked by how. How very kind combines two types of degree: on the
one hand it assigns the typical characteristics of a property to an entity, on the other it
indicates that this property attribution exceeds the speaker’s expectations. [Note that these
two types of degree necessarily appear in this order: how very kind! The reverse order is
unacceptable: *very how kind! Similarly: she is so very nice! / *she is very so nice!
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Degree modification with very is characterized by reference to the organising centre of a
notion / to the prototype. It is the most stable degree modification, hence the position of
very immediately before the adjective.]
-
So and such are not per see degree words; they identify an entity in an anaphoric relation, or,
as Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 923) put it, in an implicitly comparative way because they
imply a two-term relation. In exclamations, the second term, the locator of the comparative
relation, is absent and the only way to locate the entity is relative to the attracting centre of
the notion. Self-reference, circular location produces high degree. My God, it’s so hot today!
This kind of exclamation combines assertion with expressivity. Note that this assertion can be
denied.
-
what and how are not degree markers; in exclamatives, they range over an infinite set of
degrees and require gradable entities. What a hot day. Note that the expressivity of
exclamatives cannot be denied.
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Press.
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