On 2010-07-18, at 12:33 PM, Scott Woods wrote:

>  This will likely come up this year in English department meetings of my school and charter school group.  Does anyone have any recommendations for definitive sources to prove my point to my colleagues (nearly all of whom are fairly serious about teaching grammar)? 

Perhaps refer them to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, chapter 10.

"Clause type is the grammatical system whose five major terms are illustrated in:


[1)] a) You are generous. [declarative]

b) Are you generous? [closed interrogative]

c) How generous are you? [open interrogative]

d) How generous you are! [exclamative]

e) Be generous. [imperative]

 

D Characteristic use and general definitions

Each of the categories is associated with a characteristic use as follows:

 

[2)] clause type characteristic use

a) declarative: statement

b) closed interrogative: closed question

c) open interrogative: open question

d) exclamative: exclamatory statement

e) imperative: directive

In [2iv] we have used `exclamatory statement' rather than the more familiar `exclamation', because an exclamatory meaning can be added to any of the use categories, but the special syntactic construction shown in [1iv] is associated just with a particular kind of statement. For example, the exclamatory command Get the hell out of here or the exclamatory question What on earth are you doing? belong syntactically with [1v] and [1iii] respectively, not with [1iv]."

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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