Inverted Wh-exclamative Constructions = A Construction-based Perspective

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Exclamatives in English are used in many different syntactic formats. This paper investigates the uses of inverted wh-exclamatives which the previous analyses have taken to be rare and favored only in the literature. Together with a corpus study of inverted wh-exclamatives, the paper offers a descriptive as well as theoretical perspective on the inverted wh-exclamatives in English. It shows that the inverted wh-exclamatives are another realization of the network system of constructions in the language, supporting the construction-based view of grammar. It in particular suggests that inverted wh-exclamatives share a certain property of interrogatives in asking the hearer’s opinion (or agreement) about the situation at which the speaker is surprised.