This paper deals with the controversial connection between sentence type and illocutionary force. I focus on wh-configurations of the form How cool is that! and demonstrate that this recent phenomenon presents some interesting challenges to approaches that are concerned with the illocutionary potential of sentence forms. In particular, the exclamation component of How cool is that! cannot be derived from features of exclamative syntax, but rather is a cumulative effect of exclamative intonation, the respective adjective, and the degree reading of how. However, the V-to-C-movement property results in a special pragmatics that proper exclamatives (i.e., without V-to-C movement: How cool that is!) lack. I claim that How cool is that! asks for affirmation or objection on the part of the addressee, and that this addressee-oriented component is signaled by a dedicated class of modal particles in the German version(s) of How cool is that! To analyze these addressee-oriented exclamations (A-EXCs), I adopt a syntactic approach to the connection between sentence types and their potential illocutionary uses and thus argue that this connection is by no means arbitrary and unrestricted. I show that both the special pragmatic function of How cool is that! and the corresponding distribution of modal particles in the German counterparts can be accounted for by referring to a compositional conception of sentence-type meanings, and I hence disagree with recent approaches that deal with How cool is that! and its counterparts in German as constructions (i.e., arbitrary form-function mappings) only.

本文讨论了句子类型和言外之力之间有争议的联系。我专注于wh形式的配置How Cool is that!并证明最近的这一现象对涉及句子形式的言外行为潜力的方法提出了一些有趣的挑战。特别是“ How Cool is that!”的感叹部分。不能从感叹句句法的特征中推导出来，而是感叹语调、各自的形容词以及how的程度读法的累积效应。然而，V-to-C-运动属性导致了一种特殊的语用，而正确的感叹词（即，没有V-to-C运动：How Cool that is!）缺乏。我声称那多酷啊！请求收件人的肯定或反对，并且这个面向收件人的组件是由德语版本的“ How Cool is that! ”中的专用语气词类别来表示的。为了分析这些面向对象的感叹词（A - EXC），我采用句法方法来分析句子类型与其潜在的言外用法之间的联系，因此认为这种联系绝不是任意的和不受限制的。我展示了这两个特殊的实用功能How Cool is that!并且德语对应项中情态粒子的相应分布可以通过参考句子类型含义的组合概念来解释，因此我不同意最近处理“ How Cool is that!”的方法。及其德语版本仅作为结构（即任意形式函数映射）。