Abstract
Spanish main sentences introduced by que ‘that’ with a subjunctive verb such as ¡Que trabaje él mañana! are ambiguous between an optative reading ‘I wish he would work tomorrow!’ and an evaluative reading ‘It is annoying that he is working tomorrow!’ The only way to distinguish the two readings is by intonation: the optative reading is marked with a downward final intonation whereas the evaluative reading has an upward final intonation. These two readings differ in the presuppositions they convey (anti-factive for the optative reading and factive for the evaluative reading). The evaluative reading crucially indicates a negative attitude on the part of the speaker. I propose an analysis that builds on the idea that expressive utterances, i.e. exclamatives and optatives, are main sentences with a complex left periphery. It is proposed that the main sentences with the form <que + VSUBJ> contain an expressive operator EX that combines with a proposition and turns it into the expression with the speaker’s emotion. The emotion is evaluated with respect to a bouletic scale that orders the proposition and all the contextually salient alternative propositions with respect to the desires of the speaker; the evaluative reading is obtained when the bouletic scale is inverted.
