Pragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based on commitments at different levels of meaning, namely, the descriptive and expressive level, can be devised and it can offer interesting answers to old issues, like the contribution of exclamations to discourse, or their at-issue status, while raising new theoretical and empirical questions on lying and deceiving and commitment strength.

This chapter provides an overview of the different structures typically included under the category of exclamative sentences. After discussing the theoretical and empirical problems of defining an exclamative sentence-type, we consider the syntax and semantics of prototypical exclamative sentences, in comparison with interrogative and expressive constructions. Finally, we describe the illocutionary force of exclamative sentences as the prototypical way of performing exclamations.

En el marco de la investigación gramatical, el estudio de la estructura informativa ha recibido un impulso notabilísimo en los últimos treinta años, que ha permitido profundizar en la comprensión de numerosos fenómenos, entre los que destacan el orden de palabras y la relación entre prosodia y sintaxis.
Este volumen refleja la vitalidad actual de estas investigaciones, con una extensa introducción y siete capítulos que cubren los temas más destacados del trabajo sobre estructura informativa, desde las dislocaciones y el foco a las construcciones hendidas y la relación entre sintaxis y articulación informativa.
Manuel Leonetti y Victoria Escandell Vidal son catedráticos de Lengua Española y Lingüística General, respectivamente, en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.