The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Anna Chernilovskaya (Chicago and Utrecht University, grad student).

‘How to express yourself: on discourse effects of wh-exclamatives’

DATE: October 28, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

ABSTRACT: Wh-exclamatives, like “What a nice guy I met yesterday!”, behave in discourse differently from assertions and questions. For example, they cannot be used for answering a question, neither can they themselves be answered.  Instead, the main goal of an exclamative utterance is to convey speaker’s attitude. In this talk I will tell about my work in progress concerning discourse behaviour of wh-exclamatives. It is based on the discourse model from (Farkas and Bruce 2009). I suggest a definition of the exclamative speech act operator in the way that allows to characterise discourse properties of wh-exclamatives. I will then try to generalise the proposal to describe the effect of other expressive utterances on context.