What I will tell you about "matrix" wh-"exclamatives"!

Maria Esipova

Abstract: It is well known that English wh-exclamatives have to be about degrees, e.g., one can exclaim 'How smart she is!' to express feelings about the very high degree to which she is smart, but not 'Who came!' to express feelings about the person who came or the fact that they came. Some other languages, including Russian, have been claimed to lack this degree constraint. This paper shows that while one can indeed exclaim strings like both 'How smart she is!' and 'Who came!' in Russian, there are two types of exclamations involving wh-items in Russian, Type 1 and Type 2, which have distinct form (in particular, prosody) and meaning (epistemic and affective), and Type 1 sentences are, in fact, subject to the degree constraint, while Type 2 sentences aren't. This paper proposes that Russian Type 1 sentences are instances of expressive degree intensification, with the expressive intensifier permanently promoted to the left periphery and its affect expression component, thus, being the primary speech act (cf. 'She's damn smart!' vs. 'Damn she's smart!' in English). Russian Type 2 sentences, in turn, involve embedding under a complex mirative predicate exponed primarily through prosody, which seems to be absent from the English lexicon. Thus, structurally, Russian 'Who came!' is akin to English '{Look / I can't believe / You won't believe} who came!'.