The genre specifics of English wh-exclamatives
This paper puts forward the hypothesis that wh-exclamatives in Present-day English are much more
genre-specific than has previously been acknowledged. To test this, prototypical how- and
what-exclamatives are searched for in three different corpora containing material from conceptually oral
language, that is prose fiction, personal letters and informal, spontaneous face-to-face conversations. The results show that in
terms of token frequency, wh-exclamatives are most frequent in personal letters, a genre which has hitherto not
been linked with exclamatives. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate that each genre shows a different distribution of
exclamatives. In all cases, the different structural realizations (clausal vs. non-clausal form) can be connected to the function
the exclamative fulfills in the respective genre and to the general properties of the three distinct text types. The results
compel us to consider that exclamatives might be more specialized than has been believed so far.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The syntax and semantics of exclamatives
- 2.1The syntactic characteristics of wh-exclamatives
- 2.2Semantic and pragmatic characteristics of wh-exclamatives
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Parameters of orality
- 3.2Data sources and collection of data
- 4.Results
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (36)
References
Abels, Klaus. 2010. Factivity
in exclamatives is a presupposition. Studia
Linguistica 64 (1). 141–157.
Anna, Marina & Martin Pfeiffer. 2021. Die
frühkindliche Verwendung des Exklamativformats oh+X: Noticings und
Problemmitteilungen. Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen
Interaktion 221. 1–35.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation
across speech and
writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 2007. Longman
grammar of spoken and written English, 7th
edn. Harlow: Longman.
Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad. 2009. Register,
genre, and
style. Cambridge: CUP.
Brinton, Laurel J. 2014. The extremes of insubordination:
Exclamatory as if! Journal of English
Linguistics 42(2). 93–113.
BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National
Corpus, XML Edition. Oxford Text Archive. [URL]
Castroviejo Miró, Elena. 2008. Deconstructing
exclamations. Catalan Journal of
Linguistics 71. 41–90.
Charleston, Britta M. 1960. Studies on the emotional and affective
means of expression in Modern English. Bern: Francke Verlag.
Chernilovskaya, Anna, Cleo Condoravi & Sven Lauer. 2012. On
the discourse effects of wh- exclamatives. In Nathan Arnett & Ryan Bennett (eds.), Proceedings
of the 30th West Coast Conference on Formal
Linguistics, 109–119. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Collins, Peter. 2005. Exclamative
clauses in English. Word – Journal of the International Linguistic
Association 561. 1–17.
D’Avis, Franz-Josef. 2002. On
the interpretation of wh-clauses in exclamative environments. Theoretical
Linguistics 281. 5–31.
Elliot, Dale E. 1974. Toward a grammar of
exclamations. Foundations of
Language 11(2). 231–246.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1979. Complement
selection and the lexicon. Linguistic
Inquiry 10(2). 279–326.
Hengeveld, Kees. 2004. Illocution,
mood, and modality. In Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan & Stavros Skopeteas (eds.), Morphologie.
Morphology. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung. A handbook on inflection and word
formation, vol. 21, 1190–1201. Berlin: Mouton.
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The
Cambridge grammar of the English
language. Cambridge: CUP.
Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. Sprache
der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und
Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches
Jahrbuch 361. 15–43.
Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1996. Sprachwandel
und expressive Mündlichkeit. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Linguistik 26(102). 64–96.
McCawley, Noriko. 1973. Boy!
Is syntax easy! In Claudia Corum, Cedric Smith-Stark & Ann Weiser (eds.), Papers
from the ninth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society, 369–377. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Michaelis, Laura A. 2001. Exclamative
constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language
universals and language typology. An international
handbook, vol. 2/21, 1038–1050. Berlin: Mouton.
Michaelis, Laura A. & Knud Lambrecht. 1996. The
exclamative sentence type in English. In Adele E. Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual
structure, discourse and
language, 375–389. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Näf, Anton. 1996. Die
w-Exklamativsätze im Deutschen – zugleich ein Plädoyer für eine Rehabilitierung der Empirie in der
Sprachwissenschaft. Zeitschrift für Germanistische
Linguistik 24(2). 135–152.
Pfeiffer, Martin. 2016. The
deictic dimension of exclamations: On the use of wh-exclamatives in German face-to-face
interaction. Revue de Sémantique et
Pragmatique 401. 35–57.
Rett, Jessica. 2011. Exclamatives,
degrees and speech acts. Linguistics and
Philosophy 341. 411–42.
Sadock, Jerrold M. & Arnold M. Zwicky. 1985. Speech
acts distinctions in syntax. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language
Typology and Syntactic
Description, vol. 11, 155–96. Cambridge: CUP.
Schröder, Daniela. 2016. Gutenberg
Letter Corpus.
Schröder, Daniela. In
preparation. Independent wh-exclamative constructions in the history of
English. New York: Routledge.
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2016. Genre
dynamics in the history of English. In Merja Kytö & Päivi Pahta (eds.), The
Cambridge handbook of English historical
linguistics, 271–285. Cambridge: CUP.
Trotzke, Andreas. 2019. Approaching
the pragmatics of exclamations experimentally. In Eszter Ronai, Laura Stigliano & Yenan Sun (eds.), Proceedings
of the Chicago Linguistic Society
54
(CLS
54), 527–540. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Vialard, Maurice. 1989. Remarques
sur les “questions exclamatives” en anglais. L’Information
Grammaticale 411. 10–13.
Wiltschko, Martina. 2021. The
grammar of interactional
language. Cambridge: CUP.
Zanuttini, Raffaella & Paul Portner. 2003. Exclamative
clauses: At the syntax-semantics
interface. Language 79 (1). 39–81.
Ziem, Alexander & Michael Ellsworth. 2016. Exklamativsätze
im FrameNet-Konstruktikon am Beispiel des Englischen. In Rita Finkbeiner & Jörg Meibauer (eds.), Satztypen
und
Konstruktionen, 146–91. Berlin: Mouton.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 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.