Wh-exclamatives call for a question semantics: the view from Bangla

Exclamatives have been a subject of study since Elliott (1974), Grimshaw (1979), and others. Although languages have different types of exclamative clauses (cf. Rett 2008a, 2011), this paper mainly focuses on wh-exclamatives in Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali; Indo-Aryan (IA)). While analyzing wh-exclamatives in languages like Catalan (Miro´ 2006) and English (Rett 2008a, 2011), it has been established that they bear a degree denoting property in the domain, which caters to the surprising element of the clause. However, there is opposing cross-linguistic evidence. Languages like Turkish, Dutch, Russian, Hungarian (Nouwen & Chernilovskaya 2015); Telugu, Kannada (Balusu 2019) show a wide variety in their wh-exclamatives and cannot be analyzed along the lines of Miro´ (2006); Rett (2008a, 2011). Bangla is no exception. This paper provides a unified compositional analysis for wh-exclamatives in Bangla.