The Logical Basis of Exclamatives Kjell Johan Saebo Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the relation between speech acts and sentence types. It is reasonable to assume that assertions are based on type t sentences and that questions are based on type > sentences. I will argue that type sentences, denoting propositions, are used as exclamatives. Example: "Comme tu as de grands yeux, grand-mère!" Existing theories of exclamatives tend to assume some intensification inherent in the syntax or semantics of the sentence. By contrast, on my hypothesis the sentence just denotes a true proposition, a fact, and the rest is pragmatics: The fact predictably acts as input to the exclamative speech act function, resulting in an utterance communicating (typically) the speaker’s astonishment at it. The formal and interpretational peculiarities of exclamatively used sentences make sense in this scenario: A scalar interpretation is preferred partly because the proposition must be remarkable (literally!), partly due to competition from a more specific proposition-type sentence; and the syntactic specialties of exclamative clauses vis-à-vis run-of-the-mill indirect questions (regarding the choice of wh- word or complementizer, adjective stranding, etc.) can be interpreted as signs that the clauses are not to be embedded - either syntactically (subordination) or semantically (ellipsis), but only pragmatically (under the speech act function).