Exclamation in Late Archaic Chinese

Exclamation is constituted of sentence exclamations and exclamatives. Sentence exclamations in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC) are expressives asserting denoted propositions, parallel to their counterparts in modern Mandarin. Sentence exclamations in LAC also indicate that the asserted propositions fail to meet speakers’ expect ations, yet such a sense of surprise is not obligatory. Another property of sentence exclamations in LAC is their compatibility with focus structures whose value is reflected in a degree property. As for exclamatives, although they exist in modern Mandarin, they do not exist in LAC. There are exclamatory constructions involving degree adverbials he and heqi , which, according to traditional analyses (Yang & He, 1992, pp. 899-900; Chu, 1994, p. 303), are exclamatives. Nevertheless, I suggest that exclamatory constructions involving he and heqi in LAC fail to pass the exclamativity tests (Zanuttini & Portner 2000, 2003; Badan & Cheng, 2015), disparate from their modern counterparts, so they should not be treated as true exclamatives.


Introduction
Late Archaic Chinese (henceforth LAC) denotes Archaic Chinese during the Warring States period . The written form of the Chinese language prior to the 20 th century did not have punctuation, so readers parse Archaic Chinese texts based on contextual information, grammatical and modal particles, as well as symmetry and rhythm of parallel sentence structures; the judgement of exclamation in LAC is also the case (Chu, 1994, p. 302;Galambos, 2014).
According to traditional views, exclamation in LAC can be formed by means of distinct strategies. First, exclamation can be realized via interjections preceding declarative sentences. In LAC, there is a range of interjections indicating excitement, sympathy, sorrow, approval, surprise, etc. For instance, yi , wuhu and ai are typical interjections in Archaic Chinese (1a/b/c), and the interpretation of emotions they express relies heavily on contextual information. Among these interjections, ai is still widely used in modern Mandarin (Wu, 1980, pp. 249-251;Xiang et al., 1988, pp. 122-123;Yang & He, 1992, pp. 901-904;Chu, 1994, pp. 302-308).
(1) a. Second, in LAC it is prevalent to generate exclamation through exclamatory particles. Under most circumstances, exclamatory particles occupy sentence-final positions. The most commonly attested sentence-final exclamatory particle is zai , the fundamental function of which is to express strong emotions, similar to a in modern Mandarin (2). Alternatively, zai may appear in open and closed questions and still indicate exclamation (3a/b). Additionally, zai can be employed at the end of rhetorical questions; under this circumstance, zai is usually accompanied by an interrogative pronoun (4a) or a particle qi (4b). Although zai is allowed to be present in rhetorical questions, its function is mainly to express exclamative modality; the rhetoricalness is conveyed by interrogative pronouns or qi, as in (4b) (Liao, 1979, pp. 218-219;Wang, 1980, pp. 448-449;Pan, 1982, p. 168;Guo et al., 1999, pp. 354-355;Xu, 2002, p. 199 A counterpart of zai in LAC is fu , yet the exclamative emotion expressed by fu tends to be more low-spirited (5). It is prevalent for zai to follow another particle, e.g. hu (in a rigid order hu zai, rather than *zai hu), in a sentence-final position (6). In the situation of multiple particles, each particle maintains its individual function, and the modality of the entire sentence is normally determined by the last particle (Liao, 1979, pp. 219-220;Pan, 1982, p. 168;Xiang et al., 1988, p. 122;Guo et al., 1999, pp. 355-356;Yang, 2003, pp. 409-410;Wang, 2005, p. 298 It is worth mentioning that although the vast majority of exclamatory particles in Archaic Chinese occur in a sentence-final position, a few particles such as qi expressing modality may appear at the beginning or in the middle of sentences (7a/b) (Yang & He, 1992, pp. 893-894;Guo et al., 1999, pp. 356-359;Wang, 2001, p. 466;Yang, 2003, p. 414 Third, exclamation can be generated via inversion or reduplication (Yang & He, 1992, p. 901;Chu, 1994, pp. 303-304), as exemplified by (8a-b) and (9) respectively. As can be seen from (2) and (6), the canonical position of zai is sentence-final, but it can be fronted to a sentence-initial position with the predicative adjective (8), and under this circumstance, the exclamativeness becomes stronger (Guo et al., 1999, p. 354 In this paper, I investigate two types of exclamation in LAC, viz. sentence exclamations and exclamatives. This paper consists of five sections. In Section 2 I review previous literature on sentence exclamations and exclamatives in modern Mandarin. In Sections 3 and 4 I discuss sentence exclamations and exclamatives in LAC respectively. Section 5 is a conclusion section. The sources of LAC data in this paper are Scripta Sinica 2 database, CCL corpus 3 , and Chinese Text Project. 4 The Academia Sinica electronic database is one of the largest Chinese full-text databases to encompass a wide range of historical materials, and it contains more than 1,349 titles and 754,200,198 characters, covering virtually all important classics, particularly those related to Chinese history. The CCL corpus was developed by the Centre for Chinese Linguistics (abbreviated as CCL), Peking University, and it contains approximately 700 million Chinese Characters ranging between the 11 th BC and the contemporary era. The Chinese Text Project is an open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available online; with more than 30,000 titles and over 5 billion characters, it is so far the largest database focusing on pre-modern Chinese texts.
Selected scripts of these corpora during the Warring States period are extracted from fifteen key books represented by The Analects, Mencius, and Zuozhuan, which cover a considerable amount of discourses and genres including historical narratives, political essays, philosophical prose, ethical writing, ritual records, and medical text.

Previous research
Exclamation is constituted of sentence exclamations (11) and exclamatives (12a-c). A sentence exclamation is an exclamation formed with a declarative sentence, while an exclamative is an exclamation formed with something other than a declarative sentence. Sentence exclamations and exclamatives make the same contribution to discourse, in that they form a natural class of utterances expressing that a particular proposition has not met the speaker's expectations. Nevertheless, sentence exclamations and exclamatives are disparate in terms of the degree of restriction. That is to say, exclamatives are subject to an additional semantic restriction entailing the degree of interpretation. To be more specific, sentence exclamations express a nonscalar expectation, yet exclamatives express a scalar expectation that a gradable property is instantiated to a particular degree (Rett, 2011). Among the matrices of wh-exclamatives, there are two distinct types of structures. Semantically, they display distinct types of scalar meaning, viz. an exclamative attitude towards a wh-referent, and an exclamative attitude towards the event the wh-referent participates in. Morpho-syntactically, the former type is non-standard wh-expressions, whereas the latter bears a resemblance to embedded questions (Nouwen & Chernilovskaya, 2015).
According to Portner and Zanuttini (2000) and Portner (2000, 2003), exclamatives are identified by two fundamental syntactic components, i.e. an abstract factive morpheme F and a wh-operator. As a consequence of the syntactic representation, exclamatives exhibit two central semantic properties, factivity, and widening, from which the force of exclamatives is derived indirectly. Factivity is triggered by the abstract morpheme F, denoting the fact that the propositional content of exclamatives is presupposed. Widening, however, is correlated with the wh-operator in the sense that the domain of quantification for the wh-operator is widened, generating a set of alternative propositions. In other words, certain feature conveyed in the form of exclamatives is beyond the expectation of a certain contextually determined scale: the speaker presumes that the likelihood of the proposition is low, but the exclamative actually confirms its truthfulness, and thus a surprise effect.
In terms of exclamatives in modern Mandarin, they can be divided into three categories, all of which contain an adverbial element and a final particle a, as shown in (13a/b/c). Only Type I and Type II exclamatives are true exclamatives, because they fully pass the exclamativity tests, namely, factivity, question-answer relation, and scalarity. Type III, however, is merely a rhetorical question that might be interpreted as an exclamative in an appropriate context. First, all three types of exclamatives can be embedded under factive predicates such as zhidao 'to know' (14), yet only Type III is grammatical when being embedded under a non-factive predicate xiang-zhidao 'to wonder' or wen 'to ask', with a rhetorical question reading (15). Second, since exclamatives are inherently factive, they cannot be used as questions, as justified by the ungrammaticity of (16a) for Type I and II and the grammaticality of (16b) for Type III. Third, Type I and II express a high degree on a scale, whereas Type III does not (Badan & Cheng, 2015 The analysis of Badan and Cheng (2015) on exclamatives in Mandarin does not agree with the theory of Portner (2000, 2003) in two aspects. First, widening is not obligatory for exclamatives or sentential force. Consequently, since widening is only correlated to the surprise effect, not all exclamatives in Mandarin express surprise. Second, exclamatives in Mandarin do not necessarily require whoperators, which means exclamatives are not wh-based. Moreover, Badan and Cheng (2015) propose that: 1) widening (when present) and scalarity are overtly spelled out; 2) exclamatives are characterized by scalar focus; and 3) the sentence-final particle a is not an exclamative operator with sentential force, but an overt realization of the speaker's point of view.

Sentence exclamations
As observed by Rett (2011), sentences exclamations are parallel to lamentations that illocutionarily entail assertions (Vanderveken, 1990), as they are both expressives. The utterance of a sentence exclamation involves an assertion of a denoted proposition p as well as an expression that p does not meet the speaker's expectation.
I state that sentence exclamations in LAC are also expressives and there is an assertion of a denoted proposition (17a). The fact that a proposition can be confirmed or denied by an interlocutor justifies the assertion of the proposition. In (17b), the speaker, Confucius, makes a proposition that people are numerous; in the posterior context, his interlocutor Ranyou acknowledges his opinion by reduplicating it as a precondition to introduce a new situation. Such an affirmation helps to prove that this sentence exclamation indeed denotes the proposition and it makes a contribution to discourse. Moreover, according to the previous context, Confucius arrives at the state of Wei and finds out the impressive quantity of population there, so his exclamatory proposition is presumed to imply surprise. To reinforce the expressive nature of sentence exclamations, I refer to situations where their expressed propositions are denied. In (18a), the proposition of the former speaker, the duke, is that it is not cold though being sleety, whereas the latter speaker, Yanzi, denies this proposition with a rhetorical question; according to contextual information, Yanzi's opposition is indeed tenable: the duke does not feel cold because he is sitting in his palace in a fur coat. Similarly, in (18b), a speaker makes a proposition that virtuous people do not bring benefits to the state, so his interlocutor challenges his proposition in the following texts, by means of citing examples from both sides and then providing a conclusion that dismemberment would not render states extinct, but not employing virtuous people would. Both examples in (18)  Moreover, sentence exclamations in LAC also involve expressions that the asserted propositions do not meet speakers' expectations. According to Portner (2000, 2003), a semantic operation termed widening is a fundamental concept derived from denotation on the basis of pragmatic reasoning and connected to a surprise reading. Widening is associated with exclamatives, as it captures aspects of the meaning of exclamatives informally described as unexpectedness or extreme degree. I suggest that widening can serve as a component of sentence exclamations in LAC, as reflected by the expansion of the domain of sentence exclamations. In (19a), the speaker implies that his interlocutor's pedantry is beyond his imagination. Similarly, (19b) is an utterance of Confucius who did not realize his serious decay before. Example (19c), along with (18a), serve as additional pieces of evidence, in which the adjectives yi 'surprising' and guai 'strange' make it explicit that the expressions fail to meet speakers' expectations. Given the fact that propositions delivered by sentence exclamations can be denied (as in (18) It is worth mentioning that exclamatives in modern Mandarin are not wh-based, but characterized by scalar focus (Badan & Cheng, 2015); sentence exclamations in LAC are not wh-based either, and they are compatible with focus.
In LAC, a morpheme wei can be used to express assertive modality and is frequently translated into 'only', reanalyzed as an adverb (Djamouri, 2001;Meisterernst, 2010). I argue that wei can function as a type of clefts independently and focalize in-situ subjects that occupy a position immediately following wei. When wei appears in a sentence-initial position preceding the subject, it can assign focus on this subject and thus be interpreted as a subject focus-type cleft. For instance, the two clauses in (21a) have different subjects that express a contradiction, and (21a) shows an exclusiveness effect. Similarly, the contrast between two clauses in (21b) illustrates that they form a focus, and the implied exclusiveness justifies that wei functions as a focus-type cleft for the subject immediately following it.   (22) that contain only-focus clefts, the focus value is reflected in a degree property highlighting a high degree while opposing lower degrees; that is to say, focus constructions provide sets of alternatives for the interpretation of sentence exclamations. To reinforce the extreme degree of a scale, Example (23a) involving an adjective zhi 'ultimate' is cited here, which illustrates the placement of virtue on a scale and particularly on an extreme degree in this scale. As for (23b), it contains a description of the skill reaching a high level, which represents an extreme end of some contextually given scale. To summarize, sentence exclamations in LAC are expressives that assert denoted propositions. Sentence exclamations may express unexpectedness and scalar focus, yet neither feature is essential to sentence exclamations.

He and heqi as non-exclamatives
According to traditional views, exclamation in LAC can be formed via degree adverbials he and heqi (see Yang & He, 1992, pp. 899-900;Chu, 1994, p. 303; among many others). Nevertheless, I argue that although he and heqi can be employed in constructions indicating exclamation, they do not form true exclamatives, in that they fail to pass diagnostic tests propounded by Portner (2000, 2003).

He and heqi
In an interrogative sentence, the morpheme he is frequently employed as a wh-DP 'what', either independently as a simplex wh-argument or combined with another nominal to form a complex wh-argument (24a/b). Alternatively, he can function as a nominal predicate directly following the subject in a question (24c). Note that LAC requires VP-internal wh-DPs to raise from their base position to a preverbal position in the sentence-internal domain between TP and vP, and hence the derived SOV order in (24a-b) (Aldridge, 2010a(Aldridge, , 2010b. However, when wh-words function as nominal predicates, they do not front in general, as in (24c) (Aldridge, 2007). In (24d), the former he functions as a reason adverbial in a rhetorical question, and the latter he has fronted within the embedded domain and received a non-interrogative NPI interpretation licensed by a negator in a higher clause (Aldridge, 2010a Analogous to he , heqi is also employed in an exclamatory context in LAC, and heqi is more frequently attested than he in corpora. In most situations, heqi precedes phrasal elements, i.e. AdjPs and DPs, as in (26) and (27) respectively. Moreover, heqi may precede clausal elements, as exemplified by (28) It is notable that heqi is still used in a contemporary context to express exclamation, as in Example (29) which is cited from an article published on Beijing News (Xinjing Bao 报) in June 2023.
(29) 鸭 , 训 ! bu shi ya bo shi shu tou, jiaohun heqi chenzhong! not be duck neck be rat head lesson how hard 'It is not a duck neck but a rat head. How hard the lesson is!'

Diagnostic tests
Exclamatives in modern Mandarin pass three diagnostic tests propounded by Portner (2000, 2003) (Badan & Cheng, 2015). In LAC, however, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi fail to demonstrate semantic/pragmatic properties of factivity, question-answer relation or scalarity, disparate from their modern counterparts. Therefore, I state that exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi are not exclamatives.
First, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi in LAC do not carry a presupposition of factivity. True exclamatives should be able to be embedded under factive predicates, which indicates that exclamatives presuppose the truth of the proposition they denote, hence being factive. However, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi are never attested to being embedded under factive predicates, indicating their non-factive nature.
The fact that exclamatory constructions involving he and heqi are never embedded under factive predicates is not due to the language per se, because sentence exclamations, which are true exclamations, can indeed be embedded under factive predicates. An example of factive predicates in LAC is zhi 'to know', and in (30a), it appears in a matrix clause containing an embedded sentence exclamation. Similarly, another factive predicate zhi 'to remember' can also precede sentence exclamations, indicating their presumed truth (30b-c). Furthermore, when a sentence exclamation is embedded under a factive predicate, this verb can be negated, as in (30d). Therefore, it is safe to conclude that the reason why exclamatory structures with he and heqi never occur under factive predicates is simply that they are not true exclamations, or to be more specific, true exclamatives. Further still, exclamatory expressions involving he and heqi may be preceded by information denying their truth. In (31a), the latter clause actually expresses that deception will not happen, which is explained by the former clause as the reason. That is to say, the pre-existing context helps to show that the proposition is counterfactual. Likewise, the former clause in (31b) sets the scene that a certain person is not the speaker's lord, so the statement in the latter clause that their voices are alike cannot be factive and the speaker is actually denying the possibility. Therefore, it is reasonable to claim that exclamatory expressions with he and heqi fail to exhibit presupposition of factivity which is a prerequisite for proper exclamatives. Second, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi can function as questions, which challenges the question-answer relation of true exclamatives. To be more specific, exclamatives can never be employed as interrogatives, even though they may share identical wh-items. The reason lies in that interrogatives have the ability to introduce a set of possible answers, whereas exclamatives do not denote possible answers and hence are not compatible with responses. On the contrary, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi can be analyzed as questions and thus can be accompanied by answers accordingly. In (32a), the speaker asks about the reason for Confucius' pleasure in an exclamatory way, and his interlocutor provides a response to the question. Likewise, the speaker's expression in (32b) contains interrogativity and exclamativity simultaneously, and it receives a response from the interlocutor.
(32) a. Third, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi do not have to display scalarity. Defined as an implicature specifying that a proposition conveyed by an exclamative is at the extreme end of some contextually determined scale, scalarity indicates that an entity's property is true to a higher degree than expected, so an exclamative is supposed to refer to a degree exceeding a contextual standard (Zanuttini & Portner, 2003;Rett, 2008). In LAC, it is possible for exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi to adopt a scalar interpretive feature, yet it is not obligatory. For instance, in (34a), the speaker implies that he has predicted a situation of being insulted, yet the insulting situation is true to a higher degree than predicted. In (34b), the speaker asserts his surprise by comparing the required time and the time his interlocutor has spent, as well as the use of a conjunction showing contrast. As for (34c), the speaker's statement emphasizes that the degree to which his interlocutor's claim is ridiculous falls outside of the usual range encountered in their dialogues. Nonetheless, when he and heqi occur in exclamatory constructions, scalar implicature is not an indispensable component. In other words, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi do not necessarily give rise to a sense of surprise or amazement pragmatically. For instance, in (35a), when Confucius is asked to express his opinion on politicians, his utterance is purely to convey disdain, instead of surprise. As for (35b), its first sentence containing he does not express any sense of surprise either, because the speaker reiterates in the following context that the hegemony should be regarded as 'natural' 'destiny', rather than 'luck', so there is no element of unexpectedness. Therefore, it is safe to claim that exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi sometimes lack the scalar implicature required by exclamatives, so they should not be treated as proper exclamatives.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have investigated exclamation in LAC. Exclamation is comprised of sentence exclamations and exclamatives. Analogous to modern Mandarin, LAC has sentence exclamations that demonstrate properties of expressives and violation of the speaker's expectation of a certain contextually determined scale. Nevertheless, such a surprise interpretation triggered by widening , 2003 is not essential to sentence exclamations in LAC, rendering a set of alternative propositions unnecessary. Although sentence exclamations in LAC are not characterized by scalar focus, they are indeed compatible with focus constructions generating a set of alternatives on a contextually given scale.
In terms of exclamatives that exist in modern Mandarin, they do not exist in LAC. Although there are structures indicating exclamativity and involving degree adverbials he and heqi (see Yang & He, 1992, pp. 899-900;Chu, 1994, p. 303; among many others), they should not be analyzed as true exclamatives. Exclamatives, such as those in modern Mandarin, are supposed to pass the exclamativity tests, by exhibiting semantic features concerning factivity, question-answer relation, and scalarity , 2003Badan & Cheng, 2015). Nonetheless, exclamatory constructions involving he and heqi in LAC fail these diagnostic tests. First, there is no attested data proving that exclamatory structures with he and heqi can be embedded under factive predicates, and the denoted proposition can be counterfactual. Second, he and heqi in exclamatory sentences can be employed in interrogatives or in a rhetorical manner. Third, exclamatory sentences involving he and heqi do not have to display scalar implicature that gives rise to a sense of surprise or amazement.