On the syntax of verb-initial exclamatives*

This article discusses exclamative utterances that have the form of Y/N questions with no wh-phrase present but only the finite verb in initial position. It will be shown that they cannot be captured by a purely pragmatic 'reinterpretation' of Y/N questions. This result implies that verb-initial structures are syntactically ambiguous. An alternative to the traditional view on clause types as features/operators in the C-domain, triggering V-C movement, will be suggested. V-C movement marks syntactically all those structures that correspond to non-assertive speech acts. The structures are disambiguated by non-syntactic means like intonation and/or lexical triggers.