The cases TaG treats as exclamatives answering questions occur after broad tell-me or performance prompts, rather than as direct answers to specifically information-seeking questions.
Thus, TaG’s claim that the descriptive content of all exclamations can be denied is insufficiently supported.
“Erzähl mal”/“tell me” opens a broad narrative range of possible replies; it does not require an answer in the narrow sense.
Exclamative sentences cannot function as direct answers: the exclamative response in (16B') is unacceptable to the direct question “How fast was Eliud Kipchoge?”
Although an exclamative response such as (17B) may be suitable after “Erzähl mal” (“Tell me”), its acceptability may vary and it is not obvious that this prompt counts as a question.
TaG's modified prompt “Tell me, how did Eliud Kipchoge do in the race?” is not a question specifically about Kipchoge's speed, but an unspecific request for information about his performance.
TaG use “answer” broadly, covering both direct answers to information-seeking questions and indirect dialogue moves based on pragmatic inference or implicature.
This unspecific request can be met by many narratives, including “My god, he won!”, “He didn’t make it to the finish line,” and “He didn’t look really happy and his shoes were wet”; hence it is unsurprising that an exclamative also seems to work.
Argument from Definition to Verbal Classification
Is the context one where this definition appropriately applies?
Does a really have all the properties F₁, F₂, ... Fₙ listed?
Is the definition of G acceptable and authoritative?
Is the definition stipulative, lexical, or precising?
Are the defining properties necessary for G?
Are the defining properties F₁, F₂, ... Fₙ sufficient for G?
Paper reconstruction — Robert Wilhelmy et al. (2025), Exclamatives, deniability, and answerhood