Construction Grammar (CxG), although available as a theoretical framework since the 1980s, has a much shorter history of being applied to diachronic change as a way of exploring, among other things, how new pairings of form and meaning, i.e. constructions, arise in a language and what changes occur before and after their formation. Due to its usage-based nature, CxG provides an intuitive lens through which to view diachronic change. It has advanced our understanding of the development of a range of patterns, from highly schematic to idiosyncratic ones, and hierarchical (and, more recently, also horizontal) relationships between them. Daniela Schröder’s volume Independent Wh-Exclamative Constructions in the History of English engages with the development of English exclamative constructions from a constructionist perspective. Its focus is admittedly narrow, with three exclamative constructions traced over the period of approximately 500 years, from the sixteenth through the twentieth century, but I can say with confidence that Schröder leaves no stone unturned as far as the data she sets out to analyze.

The introductory chapter (pp. 1–15) clarifies for the reader that Schröder’s stated aim is to offer a slice of the history of three types of exclamative constructions, all illustrated below:

1. (1) How beautiful you are!

2. (2) How I miss you!

3. (3) What a bookworm he is!

These constructions are referred to throughout as independent wh-exclamatives on account of their sentential syntax, declarative-clause word order and the presence of a wh-phrase. This choice of target construction of course leaves aside a wide range of other exclamatives, notably those without a finite verb (e.g. What a shame!, How rude!). This chapter also presents the semantic and syntactic properties of exclamatives in general, goes into detail about the syntax of the three types of independent wh-exclamatives, and ends with a clear roadmap for the rest of the book. An important theoretical assumption found already in this chapter is that independent wh-exclamatives constitute fully formed constructions in the data collected by the author, that is, from the beginning of the sixteenth century onward. Given the CxG framework, Schröder explains that this assumption comes with a precise hypothesis regarding the behavior of the independent wh-exclamatives: their productivity should be on its way up. This hypothesis returns in the discussion of CxG in chapter 2 and is tested, but only partially supported, in chapter 5.

Chapter 2 (‘Exclamatives as constructions’, pp. 16–52) serves as an introduction to CxG and to its version tailored to studies of diachronic change, Diachronic Construction Grammar. The reader is offered a brief overview of how CxG defines its basic unit, a construction, and how this unit is part of a larger network of constructions, which together constitute linguistic knowledge. The exclamative construction is presented as a schematic category, with subtypes including the wh-exclamative construction, which in turn licenses the focus of this study, the independent wh-exclamative construction. Besides overviewing the tenets of CxG, Schröder sets the stage for her corpus results by defining productivity as ‘the ability of the construction to attract new lexical items that differ semantically’ (p. 27). To test the productivity of the independent wh-exclamative construction, she will later employ the measures of type and token frequency and the semantic range of the construction’s open slots. Overall, chapter 2 provides a clear and detailed foundation for what is to come, as does chapter 1.

Chapter 3 (‘Exclamatives in diachrony’, pp. 53–76) reaches into the pre-1500 history of the three independent wh-exclamatives, Schröder’s intention being to support her assumption that the formation of the independent wh-exclamative construction took place prior to the sixteenth century. No novel data are provided here; instead, we are shown relevant examples from the literature in an effort to reconstruct the developmental path of each exclamative. Schröder makes the best use she can of the existing data, discussing separately the oldest records of how-exclamatives (see (1)–(2)) and what-exclamatives (see (3)), which can be assumed, with some degree of uncertainty, to date back to the Old English period. She also pays due attention to the once variable wh-slot in what-exclamatives and spends considerable time speculating about why an indefinite article was introduced into these exclamatives. The overall, and entirely reasonable, conclusion is that the independent wh-exclamative construction, with its three subtypes, did exist pre-1500 both in a form close to its present-day syntax and with an appropriate semantics. The final section of this chapter overviews attempts to propose a possible constructional origin for the independent wh-exclamative construction. Several authors, including Schröder, converge on some subtype of the interrogative construction as the likely origin. While doing so, Schröder insists that the independent wh-exclamative construction is truly independent, that is, it does not originate as an embedded clause through a process known as insubordination. To illustrate how insubordination might have produced wh-exclamatives, consider Heine et al.’s (Reference Heine, Kaltenböck, Kuteva, Evans and Watanabe2016: 56) underlying source for an exclamative in (4). Strikethrough indicates that the clause that embeds the exclamative is elided, leaving it to serve as a matrix clause on its own.

1. (4) I can’t believe how big they are.

We do not yet have empirical arguments for or against this origin of wh-exclamatives, and nor does Schröder offer any, but it strikes me that she seems to confuse two quite separate issues: an origin of a construction through ellipsis, or loss, of some overt material and a theoretical analysis of an elliptical construction. After rejecting the insubordination origin of independent wh-exclamatives, Schröder states that it would in any case be inconsistent with CxG, which does not posit an invisible structure for elliptical constructions. While CxG indeed analyzes many elliptical constructions (including wh-exclamatives like What a shame! or How rude!) as nonsentential utterances, following the what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, this is a theoretical tool tailored to the current properties of each construction that does not conflict with a historical origin from a sentential structure, however unlikely that origin may be. Whether or not insubordination is the correct way to account for the origin of independent wh-exclamatives could, for instance, be properly resolved through an investigation of embedded (if such existed) and matrix wh-exclamatives in pre-1500 data.

Chapter 4 (‘Methodology’, pp. 77–108) provides a thorough description of the methodological choices. The corpus data span five centuries (sixteenth through twentieth) and three genres (personal correspondence, prose fiction and dialogs), and constitute a smaller sample harvested from eight existing corpora of English to minimize size-based inconsistencies. Schröder first sets out semantic and syntactic criteria for identifying the three subtypes of independent wh-exclamatives illustrated in (1)–(3). She then targets selected open slots within each subtype for statistical analyses of productivity (as defined in chapter 2), which also require a prior semantic classification of the syntactic categories that can fill each slot. She explains that productivity was measured by calculating type and token frequencies and standardized type–token ratios for each slot. As the final step, simple collexeme analyses were implemented as a way to probe the extent to which semantic categories and individual lexical items were attracted by the three independent wh-exclamatives, or in other words, were typically associated with them. Although not mentioned in this chapter, covarying-collexeme analyses were also performed on wh-exclamatives to estimate the degree of interdependence between the different slots within them. All of the selected analytical procedures are well justified and tailored to the research question at hand.

Chapter 5 (‘Results: Changes in productivity’, pp. 109–62) examines how well each independent wh-exclamative aligns with the levels of productivity that may be expected for a well-established construction. Specifically, Schröder expects extension, over time, to the semantic range of lexemes filling specific slots within an independent wh-exclamative. For instance, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the adjective slot (i.e. the adjective that immediately follows the wh-phrase) in the exclamative depicted in (1) expands the range of adjectives that can fill it, from those expressing emotions (the prototypical semantics of exclamatives) to several other types. This expansion signals an uptick in productivity and is consistent with Schröder’s hypothesis that at this stage of its development this construction should behave exactly this way. However, Schröder reports that no other slot in any of the remaining independent wh-exclamatives tracks this pattern. The independent wh-exclamative depicted in (2) shows signs of decreasing productivity, while the independent wh-exclamative shown in (3) appears to have reached a high level of productivity in the current data, or even before the period under investigation. Less central to Schröder’s research question is the finding that the overall frequency of independent wh-exclamatives is genre-dependent, increasing in personal correspondence over the period of 500 years and doing so in prose fiction until the nineteenth century. All of these findings are addressed in detail in the chapter that follows.

In chapter 6 (‘Theoretical implications’, pp. 163–202) we can see clearly the thoroughness with which Schröder approaches her results. The chapter is divided into four sections, each of them focused on one theoretical point that the results raise. First, the results provide the basis for formulating a formal representation of each independent wh-exclamative, including their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties, and the genre they are typically associated with. Second, Schröder illustrates an attempt to examine relationships among open slots within two independent wh-exclamatives using covarying-collexeme analyses, and thus adding additional data to her earlier results. The logic behind doing so is that changes in the productivity of one slot may be synchronized, or not, with changes in another slot, possibly impacting the overall productivity of the exclamative. She finds much variation on this front, comparing the exclamatives in (1) and (2): in the exclamative in (1) the adjective slot and the subject slot (typically filled by a pronoun) are independent of each other (recall that this adjective slot is the only one showing productivity in the expected direction), but in the exclamative in (2) the subject slot (also typically filled by a pronoun) and the verb slot are not. This brings Schröder to her third point, the surprising lack of increasing productivity shown by the independent wh-exclamatives in (2) and (3) despite their constructional maturity, which she defends in chapter 3. I agree that this pattern needs an explanation, but Schröder’s conclusion that the differences in productivity observed in the exclamatives reflect differences in their age is far from intuitive, given the discussion in chapter 3. It seems circular to first argue that all three independent wh-exclamatives are at least as old as Old English and fully established as constructions by the sixteenth century only to then claim that the exclamative in (3) is older than the other two on the basis of its productivity profile. Another problem with this claim is that, of the three exclamatives, (3) has the most complex history in terms of its syntax (i.e. changes in the wh-phrase and the addition of an indefinite article), a history which may have impacted its constructional development in unpredictable ways, but this, unfortunately, is not an issue Schröder engages with. Nor does she consider the possibility that we could localize the constructionalization of (3) to Middle English after what became fixed in the wh-phrase slot and an indefinite article was added, making it in fact the youngest independent wh-exclamative. The remainder of this chapter asks whether it is justified to speak of a schematic exclamative construction licensing several subtypes, including the independent wh-exclamatives. Schröder sees it as problematic that no uniform syntax can be proposed for such a construction and suggests that a phonological criterion could be used instead. I am not convinced that this is problematic. After all, it is common in CxG to classify constructions based only on their semantics or their syntax, allowing the other to vary somewhat with each subtype, which may be licensed by yet another construction via multiple inheritance. One example is Traugott’s (Reference Traugott, Yáñez-Bouza, Moore, van Bergen and Hollmann2019) network of English modal constructions and another is Ginzburg & Sag’s (Reference Ginzburg and Sag2000) network of English interrogative constructions (constructionist in nature though developed in the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar framework).

Chapter 7 (pp. 203–10) is the final one, first summarizing the previous discussion and then pointing to future lines of research in (Diachronic) CxG on the basis of the results. For me, the key takeaway is that the earliest history of the independent wh-exclamatives is worth examining in empirical detail.

The empirical value of Independent Wh-Exclamative Constructions in the History of English cannot be denied. It showcases the author’s success in providing the linguistic community with a new resource on English exclamative constructions and attention to detail in doing so. The reader will definitely appreciate the clear and thorough theoretical background on (Diachronic) CxG and the notion and measures of productivity, the detailed methodology chapter, the discussion (lengthy, at times) and recurring summaries of the results, and the deep engagement with the existing literature. As shortcomings, I would point to the author sometimes drawing what seem to me to be unwarranted conclusions and making categorical claims that are difficult to defend without solid empirical support.