Portner, Paul and Raffaella Zanuttini. “Nominal Exclamatives in English”. In Ellipsis and Non-Sentential Speech, edited by Robert Stainton and Ray Elugardo, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy series), 57-67.
In this contribution we consider a type of exclamative construction in English which shows an unusual pairing between syntactic form and semantic/pragmatic function. This is the nominal exclamative, illustrated in (1):
(1) The strange things that he says!
(2) What strange things he says!
(1) is a noun phrase, and thus contrasts syntactically with (2), which is a clause. Yet the two seem to be synonymous. We will argue that the noun phrase is not embedded in an elliptical structure; rather, the phrase we see is all there is. And furthermore we will argue that (1) is not just pragmatically equivalent to (2); the two are in fact semantically equivalent as well. This raises the question, of central concern to this volume, of how a noun phrase achieves such a clause-like function.
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