Competing analyses for 'how' pseudo questions in English

This paper tackles the issue of how best to represent syntactically English how pseudo-questions (HPQs) such as How cool is that?!, which seem to show properties of both wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives. Despite the presence of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI), which can give rise to HPQs string identical to how degree questions (HDQs), their interpretation is closer to that of an exclamation than of a question. HPQs hold a number of other syntactic and semantic properties in common with exclamatives/exclamations, to the exclusion of interrogatives/questions. Consequently I will argue that they are best considered as a special type of exclamative, differing in interpretation from standard non-inverted exclamatives in English in conveying a greater degree of speaker involvement in the evaluation expressed. When one tries to elaborate a syntactic representation for HPQs, two issues arise. Firstly, many existing accounts of wh-interrogative and wh-exclamatives tie SAI to interpretation as a question, and thus are unable to account for inverted exclamatives. Secondly, the issue arises as to how to capture the subtle differences in interpretation between ‘standard’ exclamations and HPQs. This article offers two possible syntactic analyses for HPQs, one couched in minimalist terms, the other following cartographic assumptions. The intention is not to choose between the two, but to consider the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. The broader implication of the paper is that standard accounts of clause typing which identify only canonical wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives, and which impose a strict division between the two, do not do justice to the full range of descriptive facts for structures such as HPQs which seem to sit somewhere in the middle