The relevant exclamatory meanings are analyzed as emotive assertions: they involve asserted emotion, commitment to the relevant proposition,
The relevant exclamatory meanings are analyzed as emotive assertions: they involve asserted emotion, commitment to the relevant proposition, and intensity.
Paper reconstruction — Andreas Trotzke & Anastasia Giannakidou (2025), The landscape of exclamations: brief musings on emotive language
A distinct exclamative clause type would require a dedicated force other than assertion, question, or command.
An utterance with the relevant effect is analyzed as an emotive assertion: it asserts emotion, is veridically committed to the proposition's truth, and presupposes intensity.
For the Kipchoge example, the analysis includes assertion of amazement or surprise, a subjective-veridicality presupposition that the speaker believes Kipchoge ran extremely fast, and a counter-expectation presupposition that the speaker did not expect this.
The German and Greek data led to the syntactic claim that the relevant structures contain ellipsis of a higher emotive predicate and are embedded under a higher assertive predicate rather than instantiating an exclamative clause type.
The ten commentaries provide patterns from numerous languages that substantiate the claim that exclamations are a rich and diverse set of structures rather than one sentence type.
The exclamation effect occurs with multiple distinct morphosyntactic structures and reuses existing morphology, including wh-forms, degree adverbs, and expressive words.
Accordingly, there is no distinct illocutionary force, speech act, or clause type of exclamation.