Les exclamatives de degré en français

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of Scalar Exclamatives in French. Are excluded from the study Parangon Exclamatives (e.g. Quel chapeau il portrait ! What a hat he had !). Scalar exclamative words (SEW) belong to several morpho-syntactic classes : adverbs (si, tant, tellement), adjectives (tel), WH-adverbs (combien, que (de N), comme, comment) or complementizers (comme, que, ce que, qu’est-ce que, si). For space reason, only exclamatives with Adjectives or Adjective Phrases are considered in the study. The main claim is that SEWs are ordinary degree modifiers. Qua modifiers, they select the Adjectives or APs they modify : they require the degree to be unequal to a threshold or a standard. Moreover, they are not felicitous with explicit boosters. The main implication of the study is that the specificity of Scalar Exclamatives does not hinge on degree semantics. Reference is made to another study in which it is analyzed in terms of ego-evidentiality.

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