55In all of these cases, I would like to suggest, hwæt serves as the mirror image
of the evidential in the following clause; rather than expressing the speaker’s
knowledge, it questions the hearer’s knowledge, thereby bringing about an
interaction between speaker and hearer: The poet begins by asking the audi-
ence what it knows and then goes on to tell it what he knows. Hwæt and the
following evidential together establish that the information is shared between
speaker and hearer. In effecting this interaction, hwæt functions prototypically
as a pragmatic marker.
2.3.2.4 Hwæt as a Degree Modifi er? Basing his interpretation of
hwæt on the view that the sentence it precedes is exclamatory, Walkden ( 2013 )
argues that hwæt must express degree/ scalarity and mean ‘how.’ He discusses
fi ve OE examples exemplifying this meaning: the fi rst line of Beowulf cited at
the beginning of this chapter, my examples (1d) and (6a), and the following
two examples:
(10) a. Hwæt ða Eugenia hi gebletsode, (ÆLS (Eugenia) 171)
‘What then Eugenia blessed herself’
b. wer & wiif, heo tu beoð in anum lichoman, ono se ðe geðyrstigað onwreon
þa sceondlicnesse his steopmeder, seo an lichoma mid his fæder wæs, hwæt
se soðlice onwriið his fæder scondlicnesse. (Bede 1 16.70.15)
‘ “Man and wife, they two shall be in one body”, then he who dares to
uncover the shame of his stepmother, who was one body with his father, in
very truth he uncovers his father’s shame’ (Miller’s translation, 1890 : 71)
Walkden observes that his translation of ‘how’ works well for (6a) (‘Juliana!
How beautiful you are’) and for (1d) (‘How I want to tell you of the best of
dreams’). While I can see the possible reading of (6a), since beauty is decid-
edly gradable,^15 I fi nd the reading with ‘how’ for (1d) less convincing since
telling does not immediately seem to be a gradable concept. Walkden ’s reading
of the fi rst lines of Beowulf (‘How much we have heard of the might of the
nation- kings in the ancient times of the Spear- Danes’) seems plausible, but
rather at odds with Bammesberger ’s ( 2006 : 6) carefully argued reading, for
example (‘We truly know about the might of the nation- kings in the ancient
times of the Spear- Danes’).
Walkden admits that a ‘how’ reading for (10a) is “less straightforward”
since the verb ‘bless’ is not gradable; he argues that there can be a null grada-
ble predicate and suggests the reading ‘How fervently Eugenia then blessed
herself’ (480). As discussed below ( Sections 4.2.1 – 3 ), this example of hwæt þa
must be interpreted as a different form entirely.
15 In fact, BTS (s.v. hwæt , adv. or interjection, def. III) (also the OED: s.v. what , def. B II
4) includes this as an example of hwæt meaning ‘how, what.’
2.3 Exclamatory Hwæt in Verse