Exclamatives in Mandarin Chinese

This paper deals with exclamatives in Mandarin and has two main objectives. The first is the application of the exclamativity tests proposed in the literature to identify " true " sentential exclamatives in Mandarin. The second goal is to establish the essential components of sentential exclamatives in Mandarin, in order to understand the necessary components in exclamatives cross-linguistically. Our starting point is Zanuttini and Portner's (2000, 2003) proposal, which argue that the two fundamental syntactic components that identify a clause as an exclamative are a factive operator and a wh-operator. They identify the force of exclamatives, with a semantic operation called widening, which is connected to the surprise reading generally considered to be associated with exclamatives. In this paper, we show that there are only two types of true exclamatives in Mandarin, both involving scalar degree adverbs. These two types of exclamatives reveal that, contra Zanuttini and Portner, neither wh-elements, nor surprise is an essential property of exclamatives. We argue that scalar focus, ego-evidentiality as well as factivity form an integral part of exclamatives.

Jaar van publicatie:2015