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Recently, Yoshida et al. (2014) propose a movement-plus-ellipsis analysis of the Why-Stripping construction with base-generation of why in the clause initial position. While agreeing with the idea of base-generated why in this construction, this paper argues that Yoshida et al. have a number of limitations, especially with respect to the clausal ellipsis requirement and the analysis of Stripping constructions with other adverbials. In this paper, a non-movement, non-ellipsis based analysis of the construction will be proposed on the basis of Ginzburg & Sag’s (2000) approach to fragment clauses. By incorporating Minimal Recursion Semantics representations, this paper also provides an account of question interpretations, focus-sensitive readings, and scope relations in why and other adverbial Stripping constructions.

While illocutionary force of exclamation is manifested by many different sentence types, it is controversial what kind of sentences have sentential force of exclamatives. Drawing upon some recent works such as Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996b), Ginzburg and Sag (2000), and Zanuttini and Portner (2003), this paper focuses on essential semantic properties of exclamatives, factivity and scalar implicature. We argue that in English, not only wh-exclamatives but also inverted exclamatives and nominal exclamatives are characterized as exclamative constructions by these semantic properties. Departing from Zanuttini and Portner (2003), who, linking such semantic properties to syntactic components, recognize a factive marker and wh-operator as key syntactic elements, this work proposes an analysis in which different syntactic forms exhibit the same core semantic properties of exclamatives. While none of the previous analyses account for the three different types of exclamatives, i.e., WH, inverted, and nominal exclamatives by a coherent mechanism, the present paper provides a unified account of their semantic properties within the framework of HPSG, with their syntactic differences taken care of by different phrasal type constraints.