Across Greek, German, and English, wh-exclamatives, that-exclamatives, and declarative exclamations are structurally and semantically allied
Across Greek, German, and English, wh-exclamatives, that-exclamatives, and declarative exclamations are structurally and semantically allied with emotive-verb complements.
Paper reconstruction — Andreas Trotzke & Anastasia Giannakidou (2024), Exclamation, intensity, and emotive assertion
Among Greek complementizers, only pu occurs after verbs of emotion; Greek exclamatives therefore resemble complements selected by emotive verbs.
Emotive verbs do not objectively factively presuppose their complements, but their subject is doxastically committed to the complement proposition (subjective veridicality).
The Greek ti-plus-adjective pattern is not an ordinary degree-question form: neutral degree questions require poso ‘how much’, and are incompatible with pu.
Greek wh-exclamatives use ti ‘what’ plus an adjective and the complementizer pu; pu is optional but strongly preferred in this construction.
Exclamatives can have descriptive/assertive content and can answer information-seeking questions when the information-structural and discourse context makes that content the main point.
Contrary emotives such as be surprised and be amazed carry counterexpectation: the attitude holder believed the contrary immediately before and through utterance time.
German embedded word order, dass distribution, the contrast with ob-interrogatives, and modal-particle distribution support treating German exclamatives as elliptical emotive-matrix structures and as non-interrogative emotive assertions.