Vol. 9 No. 16 (2025): Latin and the comparative reconstruction of QU-exclamatives

Michiel de Vaan. Part of the Special Collection "Latin and Sabellic relative clauses". 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.