NP exclamatives and focus (original) (raw)

2018

Abstract

This paper makes a contribution to the study of Spanish noun phrase (NP) ex-clamatives, such as ¡Las tonterías que dicen! 'The silly things they say!'. The main purpose is to explore the relation between NP exclamatives and the notion of focus. I compare NP exclamatives with canonical focus-marking constructions such as focus-fronting constructions and cleft sentences and show that they share some crucial syntactic and prosodic features. Elaborating on both the similarities and differences between these different constructions, I argue that NP exclamatives exhibit a special kind of focus that points not to the propositional content, but rather to the relation between the propositional content and the exclamative illocution. Making use of both focus theory and speech act theory, I claim that exclamative constructions express a non-contrastive focus that indicates the presence of non-fulfilled speaker expectations.

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