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Title: An outstanding theory of wh-exclamatives - Rick Nouwen (Utrecth/MIT)

In this talk, I discuss joint work with Anna Chernilovskaya (Utrecht) on the semantics of wh鈥恊xclamatives. It is often thought that wh鈥恊xclamatives like (1) involve a mechanism of degree intensification (here involving the gradable adjective "nice"):

(1) What a nice house!

Such theories need an additional mechanism to account for cases that lack gradable material, such as:

(2) What a house!

For instance, the theory of Rett (2011) accounts for (2) by allowing the covert insertion of measure relations at LF. Similarly, Zanuttini and Portner (2003) assume that the domain of quantification comes with a contextual ordering, which can be used by the intensification mechanism. We point out that there is a kind of wh-exclamatives for which these approaches do not provide the expected semantics and we put forward a distinctive and crucially much simpler proposal: exclamatives directly express a noteworthiness evaluation. For instance, on our approach (2) conveys that the house referred to is considered noteworthy, where noteworthiness is defined as having intrinsic properties that "stand out". Crucially, our approach is simpler in that we do not need to assume covert measure relations, nor contextual orderings. A key motivation for our approach comes from our observation that, crosslinguistically, wh鈥恊xclamatives come in two kinds: (i) those wh鈥恊xclamatives that only involve an evaluation of the referent of the wh鈥恜hrase (examples include English "what (a)"鈥恊xclamatives and Dutch "wat (een)"鈥恊xclamatives) and (ii) those wh鈥恊xclamatives that involve the evaluation of the open proposition (examples include "who"鈥恊xclamatives in Dutch, German and Russian).