Exclaiming non-sententially: exclamative sluices and the (non-elliptical) nature of ellipsis constructions

What it is about

The paper studies exclamative sluices, bare wh-phrases used as whole utterances ("What a goal!", "How odd!"), and argues that they behave differently from interrogative sluicing. Corpus counts from the BNC, London-Lund and COCA show that exclamative sluices are more frequent than exclamative clauses, and that their resolution is mostly exophoric, that is, it is not tied to a linguistic antecedent. The authors' sample of 69 what-sluices from COCA gives Cohen's kappa 0.49, rising to 0.75 when the 10 cases (14%) judged genuinely ambiguous are set aside. The analysis is HPSG with Type Theory with Records and KoS dialogue gameboards: the exclamative is a predication of a scaled-up property on a contextually given entity, and exclamation is linked to arousal. Exclamatives are argued to have a propositional denotation, and the authors cite examples where they answer questions and can be challenged.

Ideas

• I1. Corpus-based counts for Mova: find bare wh-utterances in the English dialogue data (the school courses in world/src/knowledge.rs, and the story texts), label each one with the paper's three resolution types (recent QUD, recent referent, exophoric), and report the split. A deterministic classifier that picks the type from the last sentence of the context is a first test.
• I2. Add a ScaleUp table to the frames: an adjective or noun after "what a" or "how" yields a predicate with a positive or negative valence (the paper's "What joy!" versus "What a disaster!"). Keep the valence lexicon in a BTreeMap, with "underspecified" as a third value, and test it on the examples the paper gives (What joy!, What a hero!, What a disaster!, What a tragedy!, What a goal!, What a painting!).
• I3. Make the sluice rule of prag refuse embedding: a bare "What a goal" must not be inserted as the complement of "know" or "think", while "what a goal that was" may be. This is a simple, testable syntactic constraint, and the paper's (2) is a ready negative control.
• I4. Use the kappa procedure as a check on Mova's own annotation of such fragments: two independent rule-based labellers, reported with an agreement figure before any rule is tuned on the labels.

For Mova

The grammar chapters are languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md (fragments and exclamatives) and languages/en/31-speech-acts.md (exclaiming as an act, the exclamation contribution). The code is prag/src/irony.rs and prag/src/infer.rs for the emotive and valence readings, coref for the exophoric referent, and world/src/qud.rs for the question under discussion that fixes the recent-QUD reading. The measure is agreement between the rule labeller and a hand-checked sample, plus the embedding check in I3, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.9639

@article{ginzburg2023exclaiming,
  title = {{Exclaiming non-sententially: exclamative sluices and the (non-elliptical) nature of ellipsis constructions}},
  author = {Ginzburg, Jonathan and Kim, Jong-Bok},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.9639},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9639}
}

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