Exclamative sluices in Tunisian Arabic

Abstract

This paper studies the syntax and semantics of exclamative sluices (What a pity!) in Tunisian Arabic. Based on corpus data and two acceptability judgment experiments, the study investigates exclamative sluices formed with shnowa 'what', qadesh 'how much', and the exclamative word malla. The corpus results show that malla-sluices are frequent (82.1% in written data), while other exclamative sluices are rare. Semantically, malla-sluices often allow exophoric interpretations, whereas qadesh-sluices mainly allow recent reference readings. Experimentally, malla and qadesh sluices were rated as acceptable as their verbal non-elliptical counterparts, indicating no ellipsis advantage nor penalty. Embedded sluices occurred under both factive and non-factive predicates, suggesting that exclamatives denote propositions (Marandin 2018) rather than facts. Following Ginzburg and Kim (2023), we analyze exclamative sluices as non-sentential utterances with propositional content modeled via a ScaleUp predication over contextually salient entities.