The Interaction between Presupposition and Focus: Classical Greek Wh-Exclamatives

Richard Faure (1, 2)

1 BCL, équipe Diachronie, Dialectologie, et Phonologie (DDP) [2008..2015]
2 BCL, équipe Linguistique de l’énonciation

In this paper, we argue against the claim that exclamatives could be reducible to interrogatives in Classical Greek as sometimes argued for English. Exclamatives are original in that they denote presupposed propositions, are headed by specific (wh-morpheme h-) and focused wh-items. They necessarily involve degrees. We try to make sense of all these features by showing that the exclamative speech act resides in the meeting of knowledge (presupposition, specificity) and unexpectedness (focus, extended scales) at the semantic/pragmatic/syntax interface.

Mots clés: exclamative; exclamation; focus; presupposition; degree; ὅς; τίς

Domaines: Linguistique; Etudes classiques; Linguistique

Richard Faure. The Interaction between Presupposition and Focus: Classical Greek Wh-Exclamatives . Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2012, 12 (2). ⟨hal-01237018⟩