Tom Roberts & Kelsey Sasaki

The semantic status of wh-exclamative clauses (What a furry wombat that is!) is highly debated. Though they contain a wh-word, their function is not to ask a question, but to express the speaker’s surprise at the high degree to which a particular property holds. This combination of interrogative form with mirative, gradable meaning has led to lively disagreement about whether they denote degree expressions (e.g. Rett 2008, 2011, Espiova 2021), facts (e.g. Ginzburg & Sag 2001, Castroviejo 2006), or questions (e.g. Grimshaw 1979, Gutiérrez-Rexach 1996, Zanuttini & Portner 2003, Abels 2010).

Taking a leaf from the book of Karttunen (1977) for interrogatives, we suggest that the distribution of wh-exclamative clauses in embedded environments—heretofore unexplored terrain—can illuminate their semantics. We show, using a series of acceptability studies and a corpus analysis of embedded wh-exclamatives, that exclamative predicates are licensed under a much broader range of predicates than previously assumed (e.g. d’Avis 2002). But interestingly, we find that that the most reliable predictor for possibility of a predicate to embed a wh-exclamative is that predicate being responsive—​able to declarative and interrogative clauses (Lahiri 2002). ​We propose this novel finding motivates a question semantics for exclamatives, and challenges other accounts.