Abstract
Cross-linguistically, exclamatives are conventionally used to express the speaker’s surprise to extraordinary degrees of the property in question. Previous analyses (Elliot 1974; Gutierrez-Rexach 1996; Zanuttini and Portner 2003; Rett 2011; a.o.) focus on the semantics and syntax of exclamatives in languages with clear morpho-syntactic markers, such as English, Italian and Catalan. This thesis is devoted to investigate how exclamativity is expressed by a language without clear markings on exclamativity, like Mandarin (Badan and Cheng 2015). There three purposes in the thesis: (i) to identify the types of Mandarin exclamatives; (ii) to compose the meaning of exclamatives by the core semantic components; (iii) to map these semantic components onto the syntax of exclamatives, under the cartographic approach (Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999; Tsai 2010, 2015a). I propose that Mandarin has four types of clausal exclamatives and four types of nominal exclamatives, which are testified by the criteria proposed in the previous studies. The necessary components of Mandarin exclamatives are the sentence final particle a with the neutral tone (i.e., a0), and special degree adverbs, including duome ‘how’, duoshao ‘how many’, hao ‘so’, and zheme ‘this’ (i.e., E-related adverbs). Their obligatory occurrence crucially provides evidence for the approach that exclamatives have an independent illocutionary force (Gutierrez-Rexach 1996; Rett 2011) and a degree interpretations (Castroviejo 2006; Rett 2011). Based on Rett (2011), I further argue that Mandarin exclamatives are composed of the speech act of expressives, the surprise of the speaker, which is denoted by a0, and the sense of extraordinary degrees. Under the cartographic approach, I propose that in the left periphery there are correspondent syntactic projections for these core semantic components. The speech act of expressives is mapped to Speech-ActP; the surprise of the speaker is mapped to AttP, which has a0 as the head; the sense of extraordinary degrees is mapped to E-degP with an uninterpretable feature [E-deg] (Delfitto and Fiorin 2014), which is checked off by the E-related adverbs. Duome and duoshao are endowed with the interpretable feature [E-deg] and covertly move to E-degP to check the uninterpretable feature. Hao and zheme are degree variables occurring with a silent speaker-oriented element with [E-deg], which can thereby check the uninterpretable feature. These different dependencies are supported by the interactions between scope-bearing elements and different types of exclamatives. Finally, I extend the analysis of clausal exclamatives to nominal exclamatives, arguing that they have the same functional projections in the left periphery and the uninterpretable feature [E-deg] is checked by the E-related adverbs in the same way. This analysis provides another piece of evidence for parallels between CP and DP in the left periphery. Due to the analyticity of Mandarin, the exclamative reading results from the composition of several core components; thus, the occurrence and absence of any components leads to different meaning. For example, without E-degP, the structure can only have the interpretation of sentence exclamations, expressing the speaker’s surprise to the whole proposition (Rett 2011). Syntactically, there is no dependency of E-degP and E-related adverbs, which is empirically reflected by the different interactions of scope-bearing elements and sentence exclamations. This transparent mapping of syntax and semantics and the high analyticity of Mandarin can be clearly presented under the cartographic approach. Hopefully, the characteristics of Mandarin exclamatives can help us to have a better understanding of the interface of syntax and semantics of exclamatives.