An exceptional exclamative sentence type in Romance

The main hypothesis of this paper is that certain exclamative constructions in Catalan (queexclamatives) involve a null degree operator. It is shown that, when this analysis combines with Kayneʹs (Kayne, R., 2002. On some prepositions that look DP-internal: English of and French de. Ms, New York University) insights concerning English preposition of and its French counterpart de, a principled and unified explanation follows not only for que-exclamatives but for the related comexclamatives as well. Empirical and theoretical arguments are provided for deriving the presence of the marker de (`ofʹ) as a VP-external preposition from the existence of a quantificational structure, and that of the partitive clitic en/ne from the necessity of providing the null degree operator with a content.