The properties of the exclamative, imperative and optative sentence modalities

What is it about?

We provide a summary of the main syntactic features of exclamative, imperative, and optative sentential modality across Romance. It is shown that in order to isolate a co-herent set of defining grammatical properties for each category, it is important to dis-tinguish between form and function. Exclamatives involve a high range of syntactic variation, particularly in the list of exclamative words, subject-verb inversion, and the presence of a complementizer and/or expletive negation. In contrast, they are homoge-nous in having speaker orientation and expressing a high degree of a property. Impera-tives, which typically involve orders and requests, are quite similar across Romance in restricting the presence of the subject to contrastive uses and in preferring enclisis, but they differ substantially in negated orders, where Romance languages and dialects re-sort to different forms from the verbal paradigm. Finally, optatives, which express desires, are typically found in the subjunctive and either they are introduced by a com-plementizer or they involve verb movement to a left peripheral position, yielding sub-ject-verb inversion and enclisis.

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