Dutch Particle Exclamatives

Ever since Elliott’s (1974) seminal work on exclamatives in English, formal linguists have dealt with questions such as how to formally characterize exclamatives, which components contribute to exclamativity and how many components are involved. In the literature there are several different approaches to exclamative constructions. Some have argued that exclamatives are semantically derived from questions (Guti´errez-Rexach, 1996; Zanuttini and Portner, 2003), others, however, derive exclamatives from degree constructions (Rett, 2008). Then there are some accounts claiming that exclamatives are derived from neither one of the two. Chernilovskaya and Nouwen (2012) for instance, claim that noteworthy evaluation is most crucial to exclamatives. The current thesis will follow Chernilovskaya and Nouwen (2012) by claiming that noteworthiness is a crucial component of exclamatives. This thesis aims at getting a better understanding of exclamative constructions. It makes an attempt to...Show moreEver since Elliott’s (1974) seminal work on exclamatives in English, formal linguists have dealt with questions such as how to formally characterize exclamatives, which components contribute to exclamativity and how many components are involved. In the literature there are several different approaches to exclamative constructions. Some have argued that exclamatives are semantically derived from questions (Guti´errez-Rexach, 1996; Zanuttini and Portner, 2003), others, however, derive exclamatives from degree constructions (Rett, 2008). Then there are some accounts claiming that exclamatives are derived from neither one of the two. Chernilovskaya and Nouwen (2012) for instance, claim that noteworthy evaluation is most crucial to exclamatives. The current thesis will follow Chernilovskaya and Nouwen (2012) by claiming that noteworthiness is a crucial component of exclamatives. This thesis aims at getting a better understanding of exclamative constructions. It makes an attempt to identify the components that are crucial to exclamative constructions and explain how each component semantically contributes to exclamativity. To do so, I examine Dutch particle exclamatives and define its characteristic components. These constructions consist of a first person singular pronoun me and a modal particle toch, as in, for example, the sentence Hij heeft me toch een boel auto’s! ‘Boy, does he have a lot of cars!’. Interestingly, unlike any other pronoun, the me pronoun in exclamative constructions occurs invariably in first person singular form and therefore has no other paradigmatic forms. I argue that this me pronoun is semantically distinct from all other pronouns in that it marks ego-evidentiality. Such being the case, the me particle indicates that the source of the content is the actual speaker him/herself or in other words the EGO. As a direct consequence of ego-evidentiality, the exclamative proposition becomes veridical, that is to say that whatever the speaker’s opinion is, it should be assumed to be true according to his/her perceptive world. To simplify matters, I have taken veridicality to be equal to factivity. The modal particle toch in isolation indicates an inconsistency with the common ground (Hogeweg et al., 2011), a notion we see back in the semantics of toch in exclamative constructions. I take the exclamative toch to be the overt realization of widening, a concept introduced by Zanuttini and Portner (2003). According to Zanuttini and Portner (2003) widening can be characterized as an operation extending the domain of a certain proposition to a wider domain which lies beyond what is expected. My concept of widening, however, slightly differs from Zanuttini and Portner’s concept of widening as I will incorporate the notion of noteworthiness, as defined by Chernilovskaya and Nouwen (2012), as well as a non-specificity requirement (a notion to some extent comparable to Rett’s (2008) degree restriction). By doing so, I am able to account for a wider range of exclamative constructions. The interaction of these two particles gives rise to exclamativity. It can be concluded that lexically the particle exclamatives consist of two components: an ego-evidentiality marker me and a widening marker toch. Semantically, it consists of factivity and widening. At the end of this thesis I examine to what extent this analysis is applicable to another Dutch exclamative construction, namely wh-exclamatives and how such analysis relates to the more general literature on exclamative constructions.Show less

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Dutch Particle Exclamatives