Wh-exclamatives

Although we have so far concentrated on interrogative clauses, there are a number of other types of wh-clause found in English. One of these are exclamative clauses like:

These show wh-movement of an (italicized) exclamative wh-expression (containing what! or how!) but no auxiliary inversion. Within the framework adopted here, one way of accounting for this is to suppose that wh-exclamative clauses are CPs headed by an exclamative C – i.e. by a C containing an exclamative force feature, [EXCL-FRCE] – and that an exclamative C carries [WH] and [EPP] features but no [TNS] feature (because the only kind of wh-clause whose head C contains a [TNS] feature is a main-clause question). This means that when C merges with its TP complement, (75a) will have the following structure:

The [WH] feature of C attracts the closest maximal projection with a wh-word (i.e. the QP what fun) and moves it into spec-CP, simultaneously deleting the [WH, EPP] features on C. The resulting derived structure is that shown in simplified form below:

The auxiliary have remains in situ in the head T position of TP, since C in (76) and (77) does not have a [TNS] feature and hence cannot attract have to move from T to C.