Cover not available
Article published In:
Functions of Language
Vol. 27:2 (2020) ► pp.207–233

On the status of wh-exclamatives in English

| Universität zu Köln
| University of Graz
| Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf
Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of Discourse Grammar. It is argued that the structure of exclamatives can be related to other sentence types in terms of discourse strategies that are used for constructing texts, in particular by means of cooptation, a cognitive-communicative strategy that enables speakers to use existing text pieces for new discourse functions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The present paper
    • 1.2Sentence types
  • 2.Characteristics of exclamatives
    • 2.1Features
      • A.Exclamatives express the speaker’s affective response to a situation
      • B.The proposition expressed by exclamatives is factive
      • C.Exclamatives evoke a scalar property
      • D. Exclamatives cannot normally be negated (McCawley 1973; Olbertz 2012: 86–87)
      • E.The exclamatory force is anchored in the here and now of the situation of discourse
      • F.The wh-word is placed clause-initially
      • G.Exclamatives normally have subject-auxiliary order
      • H.Exclamatives have the morphosyntactic structure of insubordinate sentences
      • I.Exclamatives are syntactically unattached
      • J. Exclamatives occur frequently in reduced forms (Section 3.4)
    • 2.2Related constructions
      • 2.2.1 Wh-questions
      • 2.2.2Complement wh-clauses
    • 2.3Exclamatives as a distinct sentence type
    • 2.4Thetical features
  • 3.From cooptation to insubordination
    • 3.1Cooptation
    • 3.2A reconstruction
    • 3.3A ubiquitous strategy
    • 3.4Reduced clauses: A problem for the cooptation hypothesis?
    • 3.5On subject-auxiliary inversion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.17028.hei
References (55)
References
Abraham, Werner. 2016. Subjunctions as discourse markers? Stancetaking on the topic ‘insubordinate subordination’. In Martijn Wieling, Gosse Bouma & Gertjan van Noord (eds.), From semantics to dialectometry (Festschrift John Nerbonne), 1–14. Groningen: University of Groningen.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Collins, Peter. 2005. Exclamative clauses in English. Word 56(1). 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2014. Parentheticals in spoken English: The syntax-prosody relation (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeLancey, Scott. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1(1). 33–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
d’Avis, Franz-Josef. 2002. On the interpretation of wh-clauses in exclamative environments. Theoretical Linguistics 281. 5–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elliott, Dale E. 1971. The grammar of emotive and exclamatory sentences in English. Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 81. viii–110.Google Scholar
1974. Toward a grammar of exclamations. Foundations of Language 11(2). 231–246.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In Irina Nicolaeva (ed.), Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations, 366–431. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas & Honoré Watanabe (eds.). 2016. Insubordination (Typological Studies in Language 115). Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fried, Mirjam & Jan-Ola Östman. 2005. Construction Grammar and spoken language: The case of pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics 371. 1752–1778. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2006. Constructions at work. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Jane. 1979. Complement selection and the lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry 10(2). 279–326.Google Scholar
Gutierrez-Rexach, Javier. 2008. Spanish root exclamatives at the syntax/semantics interface. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 71. 117–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 2013. On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics 51(6). 1205–1247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, & Tania Kuteva. 2016. On insubordination and cooptation. In Nicholas Evans & Honoré Watanabe (eds.), 39–63.Google Scholar
. 2017. Cooptation as a discourse strategy. Linguistics 55(4). 813–855. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva & Haiping Long. 2013. An outline of discourse grammar. In Shannon Bischoff & Carmen Jany (eds.), Functional approaches to language, 175–233. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hengeveld, Kees & J. Lachlan Mackenzie. 2008. Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologically-based theory of language structure. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2015. From hand-carved to computer-based: Noun-participle compounding and the upward strengthening hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 26(1). 113–147. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney. 1993a. On exclamatory-inversion sentences in English. Lingua 901. 259–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1993b. Remarks on the construction You won’t believe who Ed has married. Lingua 911. 175–184.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaltenböck, Gunther, Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva. 2011. On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35(4). 848–893. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Paul & Charles J. Fillmore. 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What’s X doing Y? construction. Language 75(1). 1–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul & Carol Kiparsky. 1970. Progress in linguistics. In Manfred Bierwisch & K. E. Heidolph (eds.), Progress in linguistics: A collection of papers, 143–173. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
König, Ekkehard & Peter Siemund. 2007. Speech act distinctions in grammar. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 276–324. Cambrige: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. Satztyp und Typologie. In Jörg Meibauer, Markus Steinbach & Hans Altmann (eds.), Satztypen des Deutschen, 846–873. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lazard, Gilbert. 1999. Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other? Linguistic Typology 3(1). 91–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marandin, Jean-Marie. 2008. The exclamative clause type in French. In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 15th international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar, 436–456. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
McCawley, Noriko. 1973. Boy! Is syntax easy! Chicago Linguistic Society 91. 369–377.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A. 2001. Exclamative constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals, 436–456. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2015. Sign-based Construction Grammar. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 139–158. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A. & Knud Lambrecht. 1996. The exclamative sentence type in English. In Adele Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual structure, discourse and language, 375–390. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Milner, Jean-Claude. 1978. De la syntaxe à l’interprétation. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Mithun, Marianne. 2008. The extension of dependency beyond the sentence. Language 84(1). 69–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. How fascinating! Insubordinate exclamations. In Nicholas Evans & Honoré Watanabe (eds.), 376–391.Google Scholar
Nouwen, Rick & Anna Chernilovskaya. 2015. Two types of exclamatives. Linguistic Variation 15(2). 201–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olbertz, Hella. 2012. The place of exclamatives and miratives in grammar: A Functional Discourse Grammar view. Revista Linguistica 8(1). 76–98.Google Scholar
Onions, Charles Talbut. 1969. An advanced English syntax. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Peterson, Peter. 1999. On the boundaries of syntax: Non-syntagmatic relations. In Peter Collins & David Leex (eds.), The clause in English: In honour of Rodney Huddleston, 229–250. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Julia Hirschberg. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Philip Cohen, Jerrold Morgan & Martha Pollack (eds.), Intentions in communication, 271–311. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rett, Jessica. 2011. Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 341. 411–442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rett, Jessica & Sarah E. Murray. 2013. A semantic account of mirative evidentials. Proceedings of SALT 231. 453–472. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosengren, Inger. 1992. Zur Grammatik und Pragmatik der Exklamation. In Inger Rosengren (ed.), Satz und Illokation, 263–304. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994. Expressive sentence types – a contradiction in terms: The case of exclamation. Sprache und Pragmatik 331. 38–68.Google Scholar
Sadock, Jerrold M. & Arnold Zwicky. 1985. Speech act distinctions in syntax. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 155–196. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Siemund, Peter. 2015. Exclamative clauses in English and their relevance for theories of clause types. Studies in Language 39(3). 597–627. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. English exclamative clauses and interrogative degree modification. Typescript, University of Hamburg.Google Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme. 2013. Multiple inheritance and constructional change. Studies in Language 37(3). 491–514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zanuttini, Raffaella & Paul Portner. 2003. Exclamative clauses: At the syntax-semantics interface. Language 79(1). 39–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zevakhina, Natalia. 2013. Syntactic strategies of exclamatives. The Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics 4(2). 157–178.Google Scholar
. 2016. The hypothesis of insubordination and three types of wh-exclamatives. Studies in Language 40(4). 765–814. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Troughton, Faye
2024. Quelle traduction ! A study of the translation of French quel and English what exclamatives in political discourse. Meta 68:2 ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo
Schröder, Daniela
2023. The genre specifics of English wh-exclamatives. Functions of Language 30:2 ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.