Those favorable cases are better characterized as narrative replies, so they do not support the claim that exclamatives can answer informati
Those favorable cases are better characterized as narrative replies, so they do not support the claim that exclamatives can answer information-seeking questions in the narrow sense.
Paper reconstruction — Robert Wilhelmy et al. (2025), Exclamatives, deniability, and answerhood
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.
“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