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While I know how to make exclamatory sentences with nouns or adjectives (or both together), such as: "what a big animal it is" etc. I don't know how to build exclamatory sentence with a main verb, for example, when I want to show how much I love my spouse: "What I love you" absolutely doesn't sound to me natural. On the other side "How much I love you!" sounds to me a little bit interrogative sentence. So I'm not sure about that.

In many languages, exclamatory sentences with verbs start with the question word "how", but I'm not sure about English that normally use "what" instead as above.

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  • I speak two "European" languages and have no idea what you mean by exclamatory sentences starting with "how". Little Red Riding Hood's exclamations all start with "what". "What big eyes you have". germanstories.vcu.edu/grimm/redridinghood.html
    – Lambie
    Commented Jun 6, 2018 at 13:36

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Whereas "what" in exclamations is followed by a noun or a noun phrase, which sometimes is followed by a verb (and a tag):

What a pity! (Noun)

What a beautiful day! (Noun phrase)

What a nice day it is! (Noun phrase+verb)

What an interesting book it is, isn't it? (Noun phrase+verb+tag)

"how" is followed by an adjective/adverb only, or followed by the subject and the verb:

How beautiful! (Adjective only)

How lovely! (Adverb alone)

How gracefully she moves! (Adverb+subject+verb)

So I don't see anything interrogative in the exclamation "How much I love you!";

although I'd prefer "I love you so much!" or "If only you knew how much I love you!", both also being exclamations.

At the same time "how much I love you" do sound somewhat interrogative to me in the context of

If you want to hear how much I love you, I'm telling you—very, very much

.

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