the process that accounts for a; the ambiguity is easily got rid of by inserting a noun with what.
Question: What amount had I lost?
Exclamation: What an amount I had lost!
That is the first stage; the resemblance is next increased by inverting subject and verb in the exclamation, which is both natural enough in that kind of sentence, and particularly easy after In that interval. So we get
Question: In that interval, what (amount) had I lost?
Exclamation: In that interval, what (an amount) had I lost!
The words, when the bracketed part of each sentence is left out, are now the same; but the question is of course incapable of giving the required meaning. The writer, seeing this, but deceived by the order of words into thinking the exclamation a question, tries to mend it by inserting not; what...not, in rhetorical questions, being equivalent to everything. At this stage some writers stick, as Stevenson in f. Others try to make a right out of two wrongs by restoring to the quondam exclamation, which has been wrongly converted with the help of not into a question, the exclamation mark to which it has after conversion no right. Such is the genesis of a, b, d. The proper method, when the simple statement is rejected, as it often reasonably may be, is to use the exclamation, not the Stevensonian question[1], to give the exclamation its right mark, and not to insert the illogical negative.
12. Internal question and exclamation marks.
By this name we do not mean that insertion of a bracketed stop of which we shall nevertheless give one example. That is indeed a confession of weakness and infallible sign of the prentice hand, and further examples will be found in Airs and Graces, miscellaneous; but it is outside grammar, with which these sections are concerned.
- ↑ Of course, however, the rhetorical question is often not, as here, the result of a confusion, nor to be described as 'very artificial'. E.g., What would I not give to be there? To what subterfuge has he not resorted?
