Not all exclamatives behave the same
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Abstract
This article challenges the claim that exclamative sentences lack an illocutionary force of exclamation and are semantically equivalent to emotive assertions. Drawing on German data, we show that there are different classes of exclamatives that vary with respect to deniability and do not function well as answers to information-seeking questions but rather serve as replies in discourse. We argue that all the different classes need to be taken into account to arrive at appropriate generalizations for the phenomena under discussion.