The Mandarin Hao-yi-CL NP Construction as a Nominal Exclamative

This paper argues that the Mandarin hao-yi-CL NP construction is a nominal exclamative rather than a clausal one. Unlike previous research on nominal exclamatives, which treats them as syntactically nominal but typically assigns them a non-nominal target of exclamation (Portner and Zanuttini, 2005; Rett, 2011), we propose that hao-yi-CL exclamative are nominal both syntactically and semantically. Based on Chernilovskaya and Nouwen's (2012) theory on exclamatives, we argue that hao-yi-CL exclamatives are i-level exclamatives, which, with hao as an expressive attitude operator, conveys the noteworthiness of the entity denoted by the DP yi-CL NP. Formally, we provide a syntactic structure for this construction based on Ritter and Wiltschko's (2019) proposal that there is a speech-act structure in the nominal spine. This analysis achieves a transparent syntax-semantics type matching and a fully compositional derivation within Chernilovskaya and Nouwen's framework.