From Formal Syntax to the Classroom: Clause-Type Classification and the Exclamative Sentence in Albanian Grammar

Abstract

How a grammar classifies clause types is not a question that stays inside the grammar. The classification adopted by a standard reference grammar passes into the national curriculum and into school textbooks, and so determines what learners are taught about the relationship between grammatical structure and emotional expression. In Albanian, the classification sanctioned by the standard academic grammar denies the exclamative the status of a basic clause type, treating exclamative value as an affective or intonational modification of declaratives, interrogatives and imperatives. This paper argues that the classification is descriptively inadequate and pedagogically costly. Combining the cartographic model of the split left periphery with the tools of formal semantics, it shows that the Albanian exclamative is subject to formal constraints that no intonational account can derive: obligatory A-bar movement of the operators sa, ç' and çfarë to the focus position of the left periphery, a factivity constraint restricting embedding to emotive and factive predicates, and a gradability requirement on the predicates modified by sa. The analysis rests throughout on the distinction between the sentence, an abstract unit of the linguistic system, and the utterance, a dynamic unit of discourse. That distinction is also the principle a curriculum needs if it is to separate what learners perform in discourse from what they know as grammar. A cross-linguistic comparison with English, Italian and Modern Greek shows the relevant constraints to be parametric rather than languagespecific, and the paper closes by setting out what follows for textbook description, teacher education and curriculum design, in Albanian and in any language curriculum that classifies clause types by expressive force.