Exclamativas encubiertas en español

Since Bosque (1982; 1984a) extrapolated to Spanish grammar the concept of concealed exclamation introduced by Elliot (1971; 1974) and Grimshaw (1979), the analysis of determiner phrases (DPs) such as los libros que le gustan in Ya te imaginas los libros que le gustan and la altura del edificio in Me sorprendió la altura del edificio has not been homogeneous. While some authors agree in analyzing both DPs as concealed exclamations (DPs semantically equivalent to indirect exclamative clauses and arguments of an explicit predicate), others confine this analysis to the latter DP. They analyze the former either as a clause with exclamative import subordinate to an explicit predicate (a quantified clause or a complement clause) or as a DP with exclamative import providing the argument for an explicit predicate which they do not consider a concealed exclamation, but a nominal exclamative structure or a nominal emphatic relative construction. Our goals are: 1) to review the analyses proposed so far for this type of structures, and 2) to put forward an analysis of these DPs characterizing them not as arguments of an explicit predicate, but as genuine DPs that are remnants of grammatical ellipsis. Specifically, they are argued to be subjects of elliptical clauses that are simultaneously indirect exclamatives and predicational copular clauses.