De l’interrogation à l’exclamation

From the 17th to the 20th century, the interpretation of savoir comme S (to know how/how much S) has evolved: these constructions had first an interrogative meaning, and then became mainly exclamative. This paper aims at describe one of the most important contextual modifications this evolution is correlated with, namely changes concerning savoir (to know). Semantic factors seem to be very important to identify the meaning, so one can conclude that a single syntactic structure is involved in those sentences. The study is based upon examples coming from Frantext corpora.