Latin and the comparative reconstruction of QU-exclamatives

Abstract

While there are many synchronic studies on exclamatives, diachronic studies into the origin and development of exclamatives are rare. In this paper, I study the Latin evidence in order to arrive at a method for investigating the historical development of a subset of exclamatives, viz. exclamatives headed by interrogatives (QU-). I propose a classification of these exclamatives which takes into account their syntactic behaviour and their semantics. The specific distributional patterns found in Latin support existing etymological insights and allow for a few typological generalizations.