Sull'intonazione della frase esclamativa: una disamina

This study deals with the intonation of the exclamative sentence. It is a special sentence structure characterized by many semantic-pragmatic properties: its content must be salient, surprising, factive, semantically wide. Exclamative sentences introduce a conventional scalar implicature and receive an extreme degree interpretation. In this paper, a general outline of the crucial interplay between the prosodic and pragmatic features is given. Generally, exclamatives show a final falling pitch contour, a greater pitch extension, a prominent accent on the wh-word and a longer duration than questions and assertives. Starting from the empirical data in the literature, we will try to demonstrate how the prosody of the exclamative sentence is determined by its pragmatic properties and therefore it is also less variable in a cross-linguistic comparison.