| Summary: | The present study explores the exclamative use of the feminine definite article <i>la</i> in structures such as ‘<i>¡La de chicos que besé en la fiesta!</i>’ (How many guys I kissed at the party!). First, a morphosyntactic description of the pattern is offered so as to show that the data under analysis are pseudopartitive constructions which display all the characteristics of primary and partial exclamatives. Building on research on nominal exclamatives, we conclude that these examples are not CPs but indefinite DPs with an exclamative flavor which contain a semi-relative clause introduced by <i>que</i>. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, we schematize a set of syntactic structures which capture the ‘chimeric’ and hybrid nature of the data, these being halfway between DPs and exclamative clauses. In order to do so, it will be necessary to split the DP into smaller projections (FocP, FinP), since <i>la</i> must move to Spec-FocP to be interpreted as an exclamative operator.
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