@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/sl.39.3.06sie, author = "Siemund, Peter", title = "Exclamative clauses in English and their relevance for theories of clause types", journal= "Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language”", year = "2015", volume = "39", number = "3", pages = "698-728", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.39.3.06sie", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/sl.39.3.06sie", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "0378-4177", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "clause types", keywords = "usage", keywords = "clause type systems", keywords = "English", keywords = "corpus analysis", keywords = "exclamative clauses", abstract = "In the present study, I investigate the grammar and usage of English exclamative clauses of the type What a wonderful journey this is! and How wonderful this journey is! Building on existing research, I argue that the exclamative clause type can be motivated both syntactically and semantically/pragmatically. In the main part of my study, I offer a usage-based analysis of English exclamative clauses drawing on data from the British National Corpus and the International Corpus of English, British Component. I consider 703 tokens of what-exclamatives and 645 tokens of how-exclamatives. My analysis reveals that English exclamatives typically occur in reduced form lacking an overt verbal predicate, i.e. What a wonderful journey! or How wonderful! I provide an explanation for the predominance of reduced forms based on the semantico-pragmatic properties of exclamations. Moreover, I argue that the usage properties of exclamatives render it a marginal clause type, as it is highly infrequent and predominantly appears in non-clausal forms. Usage data point to a cline of clause types as the more appropriate approximation of reality instead of the familiar distinction between major and minor clause types.", }