Advances Analysis Spanish Exclamatives
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ADVANCES in the ANALYSIS of SPANISH EXCLAMATIVES EDITED BY Ignacio Bosque THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN HISPANIC LINGUISTICS Javier Gutiérrez- Rexach, Series Editor Advances in the Analysis of Spanish Exclamatives Edited by Ignacio Bosque THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2017 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Bosque, Ignacio, editor. Title: Advances in the analysis of Spanish exclamatives / edited by Ignacio Bosque. Other titles: Theoretical developments in Hispanic linguistics. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2017] | Series: Theoretical develop- ments in Hispanic linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016041476 | isbn 9780814213261 (cloth ; alk. paper) | isbn 081421326X (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Spanish language—Exclamations. | Spanish language—Syntax. | Spanish language—Semantics. Classification: lcc pc4395.a35 2017 | ddc 465—dc23 lc record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2016041476 Cover design by AuthorSupport.com Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Minion and Formata The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi- als. ANSI z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The series Theoretical Developments in Hispanic Linguistics was conceived and directed by Javier Gutiérrez- Rexach, whose sudden and unexpected passing has meant a tremendous loss for the international linguistics community. The extraordinary significance of Javier’s contributions to the field of Hispanic linguistics over the past twenty- five years will inspire the work of many researchers in the future. This book, which contains one of his last contributions, is dedicated to his memory. Contents Chapter 1 • Spanish Exclamatives in Perspective: A Survey of Properties, Classes, and Current Theoretical Issues 1 Ignacio Bosque Chapter 2 • Más-Support 53 Luis Sáez Chapter 3 • Optative Exclamatives in Spanish 82 Cristina Sánchez López Chapter 4 • Exclamatives in (Argentinian) Spanish and Their Next of Kin 108 Pascual José Masullo Chapter 5 • At-Issue Material in Spanish Degree Exclamatives: An Experimental Study 139 Xavier Villalba Chapter 6 • Exclamative Sentences and Extreme Degree Quantification 159 Raquel González Rodríguez Chapter 7 • Embedded Exclamatives and the Ingredients of Grounded Belief 181 Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Patricia Andueza References 211 List of Contributors 229 Index 232 1 Spanish Exclamatives in Perspective A Survey of Properties, Classes, and Current Theoretical Issues Ignacio Bosque 1. Introduction Exclamative constructions are the result of the rather intricate (and not fully understood) crossing of several syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variables. Even so, substantial progress in all of these factors has been achieved in recent years, both from theoretical linguistics and the specific grammar of Romance languages. A large number of recent theoretical studies, most of them mentioned below, constitute substantial contributions to our under- standing of the semantic import of the grammatical ingredients of these peculiar constructions. Results of this abundant research touch on the pro- jections that articulate their syntax, the specific processes of variable binding in structures of degree quantification, the interpretation of mirative and evidential particles, the behavior of exclamatives in negative and subordinate contexts, and the grammatical consequences of the very significant differ- ences between interrogative and exclamative patterns, among others. I would have liked to express my deep gratitude to Javier Gutiérrez- Rexach for inviting me to participate in this series. I am also very grateful to Cristina Sánchez López and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of this chapter. This research has been par- tially supported by grant UCM-930590 from the Complutense University, Madrid. 1 2 • Chapter 1, Ignacio Bosque The specific ways in which these theoretical issues are relevant for the grammar of Romance languages have been analyzed with much detail in recent years. Main contributions include research on French (Gérard, 1980; Bacha, 2000; Rys, 2006; Beyssade & Marandin, 2006; Marandin, 2008, 2010; Burnett, 2009; Kellert, 2010), Portuguese (Bastos-Gee, 2011), Catalan (Castroviejo, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b; Villalba, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2008b), and Italian (Benincà, 1995, 1996; Zanuttini & Portner, 2000, 2003; Porter & Zanuttini, 2000, 2005; Munaro, 2003, 2005, 2006; Benincà & Munaro, 2010; Zanuttini et al., 2012), among other languages. As regards Spanish, main references are mentioned and discussed in this overview and the rest of the book. General presentations of exclamative structures in current theoretical grammar include Michaelis (2001), Heycock (2006), and Villalba (2008b). This book on Spanish exclamatives intends to constitute a contribution to Romance linguistics, as well as a general picture of settled, new, and pending issues in this important, as well as traditionally neglected, domain of gram- mar. The necessary comparison of exclamative structures (either present, absent, or lost) in the Romance languages family is yet to be done. The present overview aims to be a guide into the intricate jungle of exclamative patterns in Spanish. It is also meant to be a threshold to welcome the reader to the main theoretical issues and controversies standing out of the consid- erable existing current literature on this topic. 2. Exclamatives as Speech Acts Exclamatives are speech acts, and they are addressed as such in classical typologies of utterances. For example, Searle (1976, 1979) distinguishes asser- tive, directive, commissive, declarative, and expressive speech acts and sub- divides the latter into exclamatives and optatives (for developments and refinements, see also Sadock & Zwicky, 1985; Zaefferer, 2001; Abels, 2005; and Boisvert & Ludwig, 2006). Being speech acts, exclamative utterances have illocutionary force, lack truth values, and are exclusively attributed to the speaker, even if—as happens in questions—they lose these features when embedded (§ 6.5.). Whereas promises or commands are addressed to a hearer, exclamatives do not require one, unless reinterpreted as rhetorical questions or com- mands. There is little doubt that the speech act that exclamatives perform constitutes the manifestation of an emotional reaction of the speaker. In fact, in the literature it is often assumed that the key notion behind exclamatives Spanish Exclamatives in Perspective • 3 is the speaker’s surprise (Elliott, 1971, 1974; Castroviejo, 2006; Rett, 2007, 2009, 2011; Andueza, 2011; and many others). This concept is both accurate in many cases and too restrictive in others. The reason is that surprise is bound to counterexpectation, and this requirement is not always fulfilled in exclamatives. If I get up and open my window, I may utter (1): (1) ¡Qué bonita mañana! ‘What a beautiful morning!’ This utterance may be fully felicitous in complete absence of any previous (explicit or implicit) bad weather forecast on my part. One may say that the emotional reaction expressed by (1) is complacency and also that other exclamative utterances express disappointment, frustration, excitement, sur- prise, enthusiasm, or amazement, among other subtle notions. Such a large list of possible emotional reactions, together with a similarly extended paradigm of grammatical structures able to express them, have lead specialists to raise the natural question whether exclamatives are a unified speech type, or rather constitute one or several varieties of a more comprehensive one, sometimes called “expressive.” See Abels (2005), Allan (2006), Potts (2007), Merin and Nikolaeva (2008), Schlenker (2007), and Castroviejo (2008a) on this issue. Whether or not this reduction is possible, it must be stressed that, according to Zanuttini and Portner’s (2003) influential analysis, surprise and similar concepts are somehow derived notions in the grammar of exclama- tives, in fact a consequence of what they call “widening” processes. These authors argue that by using an exclamative sentence such as, say, How X she is! (X being a qualifying adjective), the speaker implies that the extent in which X is predicated exceeds or outranks the range of possibilities under consideration. In their analyses, a fundamental property of wh-exclamatives is the fact that they widen or enlarge the domain of quantification for the wh-operator,1 and this operation gives rise to the set of alternative propo- sitions denoted by the sentence. Being extreme, values expressed by degree quantifiers in exclamatives are associated with typical entailment monoto- nicity processes (Castroviejo, 2008b). The contrast between questions and exclamations is rather sharp, as regards this essential aspect of their meaning: whereas wh-words in questions pick up one alternative in an implicit set, as cómo ‘how’ does in 1. Following a standard convention, in this chapter I will use the term wh- (wh-operator, wh-exclamatives, wh-words) for Spanish instead of qu-, cu- or q-. 4 • Chapter 1, Ignacio Bosque (2a), their exclamative counterparts, as cómo in (2b), behave in a rather different way: (2) a. ¿Cómo canta María? ‘How does M. sing?’ b. ¡Cómo canta María! ‘How M. sings!’ In fact, exclamative cómo—a different word from its interrogative coun- terpart in French and other languages—refers