Exclamatives, try to be a bit more assertive!

Abstract

Trotzke and Giannakidou advance the strong hypothesis that exclamative sentences and exclamations can be reduced to a combination of three basic sentence-types (declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives) with added intensity for emphasis. Moreover, they give convincing arguments for treating root exclamatives as clauses subordinated to an emotive predicate. In this commentary I briefly evaluate such claims on empirical and theoretical grounds.