Evaluative ‘How’: Development of a ‘New’ Construction and Its Interpretation

Abstract

This paper explores the construction derived from the evaluative use of ‘how,’ which shares apparent syntactic similarities with interrogative and exclamative uses of ‘how.’ The study begins by establishing both syntactic and interpretive distinctions between the evaluative ‘how’ and the interrogative/exclamative ‘how,’ thus highlighting the autonomous nature of the evaluative ‘how’ as a separate construction. Drawing upon a cartographic approach, inspired by Munaro and Obenauer’s (1999) characterization of the surprise/disapproval construction that captures the speaker’s emotional reaction to the described situation, we integrate the construction under investigation into this framework. By elucidating the differences between the evaluative ‘how’ and interrogatives/exclamatives, this paper subsequently accounts for the construction-specific features of the evaluative ‘how’, including insensitivity to the Inner Island phenomenon, absence of long-distance movement, and addressee-orientedness.