Exclamatives are grammatical forms that convey the information that something is surprising or noteworthy in some way: in an exclamative, all the content expressed by the sentence or part of it is unexpected. If the surprising information concerns the whole sentence, we have a total exclamative, if the unexpected content is limited to a constituent of the sentence, we have a partial exclamative. An example of total exclamative in Italian is the following: Oggi fa molto freddo! (‘Today it’s very cold!’). In languages like Italian, the constituent that expresses the surprising information is introduced by a wh-element, as in the following partial exclamative: Che bel vestito che hai comprato! (‘What a nice dress you bought!’).
In LIS, we have found a distinction between total and partial exclamatives, based on the two different kinds of non-manual markers used when the two types of sentences are articulated: (a), an example of a total exclamative, is produced with raised eyebrows (re); (b), an example of a partial exclamative, is produced with furrowed eyebrows (fe). No specific manual sign introduces the two types of sentences.
re
a. cake pe ix1 adore
‘I’m crazy about that cake!’
fe
b. rain
‘How much it rains!’