Exclamatives in the functional typology of insubordination: Evidence from complement insubordinate constructions in Spanish Pedro Gras a, * , María Sol Sansiñena b a Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium b Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium Received 31 July 2016; received in revised form 26 February 2017; accepted 19 April 2017 Abstract Insubordination is defined as the phenomenon whereby a formally subordinate clause is conventionally used as a main or independent clause. Evans (2007) identifies three macro-functions of insubordination crosslinguistically -- (i) indirection and interpersonal control, (ii) modal qualification, and (iii) signaling high levels of presupposed material in the insubordinate proposition -- and places exclamation and evaluation in the second macro-function. More recent works propose a higher generalization, arguing that insubordinate constructions express interpersonal meanings, and Van linden and Van de Velde (2014) claim that these meanings ‘‘almost invariably go together with exclamative illocutionary force’’ (2014: 228). Using data from different varieties of Spanish, we show that a narrow definition of ‘exclamative’ allows to describe the properties of individual exclamative-evaluative constructions in Spanish more adequately. We argue that exclamative-evaluative constructions constitute a separate subset of insubordinate constructions, with their own formal and interpretive features. From a methodological point of view, we show that a constructional approach allows to operationalize the notion of insubordination and to set apart exclamative-evaluative insubordinate constructions from other formally similar constructions in the language. In addition, we show that the constructional status can be used as a test for insubordinate status, as an insubordinate construction pairs a ‘subordinate’ form with a non-compositional meaning. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Insubordination; Complement constructions; Exclamatives; Complementizers; Modality; Construction Grammar 1. Introduction Insubordination can be defined as the phenomenon whereby a formally subordinate or dependent clause is conventionally used as a main or independent clause (Evans, 2007). 1 Since the pioneering study by Evans (2007), there has been an increasing interest in insubordinate constructions in a wide array of languages. 2 In addition to www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 115 (2017) 21--36 * Corresponding author at: Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium. E-mail addresses: pedro.gras@uantwerpen.be (P. Gras), mariasol.sansinenapascual@kuleuven.be (M.S. Sansiñena). 1 Insubordination can be understood in a synchronic (the main clause use of a formally subordinate clause) or a diachronic sense (the process whereby a subordinate clause becomes reanalyzed as an independent sentence, through the ellipsis of main clause material). In this paper, we will use the terms insubordination and insubordinate construction in a synchronic sense. 2 There are studies on Romance (Lombardi Vallauri, 2004; Debaisieux, 2006; Gras, 2011, 2013, 2016; Patard, 2014; Gras and Sansiñena, 2015; Sansiñena, 2015; Sansiñena et al., 2015a, 2015b;) and Germanic languages (Lindström and Londen, 2008; Verstraete et al., 2012; Brinton, 2014; Wide, 2014; D’Hertefelt, 2015), as well as many non-Indo-European languages (Mithun, 2008; Robbeets, 2009; Cable, 2011 and the papers included in Evans and Watanabe, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.04.005 0378-2166/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.