Negative inversion exclamatives and speaker commitment

This paper examines negative inversion exclamatives in English, e.g., Isn’t [that]F hideous!. Traditional accounts of exclamatives would analyze this construction as encoding a high degree of hideousness, but I show that negative inversion exclamatives are compatible with ungradable predicates and extreme predicates, which suggests that the semantics of this construction is beyond that of very. I argue instead that Neg-Ex’s denote a set of alternatives via focus, with an additional expressive layer that gives rise to a conventional implicature (CI) that the speaker is maximally committed to an alternative. At a broader level, this paper calls for a re-evaluation of what “exclamative” is as a natural class.