Languages & Linguistics
Exclamatives
Exclamatives are linguistic structures used to express strong emotions or exclamations. They often involve an exclamation mark and can take various forms, such as interjections, exclamatory sentences, or exclamatory phrases. Exclamatives are used to convey surprise, excitement, or emphasis in speech and writing.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
5 Key excerpts on "Exclamatives"
- Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Second, we will examine the formal, semantic and pragmatic constraints which jointly define the exclamative sentence type — a type whose characterization is based, as in Grimshaw (1979), on the degree class (section 3). Third, we will look at cross-linguistic manifestations of this type, with particular attention to those recurrent formal properties which reflect components of the exclamative sentence type and which suggest general tendencies in the grammaticalization of exclamative construc-tions (section 4). In a concluding section (section 5), we will consider the question of whether, on the basis of the data considered, one can establish the existence of a form-function fit in the area of exclamations. 2. The conceptual basis of the exclamative category Any attempt to identify a sentence type in a given language, or to compare instances of a given sentence type across languages, relies on an understanding of the function pole of the form-function pairing. Such an under-standing has been particularly elusive in the case of exclamations, since the terms excla-mation and exclamative have often been taken to refer to emphatic or expressive utterances in general, as in the following definition from a study on exclamative intonation: L'excla-mation est généralement définie comme la manifestation linguistique d'un état émotion-nel de l'énonciateur [...] (Morel 1995: 63). Further, the label exclamation has often been applied to related expressive phenomena, like interjections and news-reporting declaratives. For example, Makkai (1985) purports to examine the diachronic sources of exclam-ations, but focuses largely on interjections. Speech-act theory (Austin 1962, Searle 1979, Geis 1995) has not helped to refine our un-derstanding of the exclamative type, since expressive speech acts, with the exception of formalized locutions like apologies, are not readily analyzed with regard to preparatory, essential and sincerity conditions.
eBook - PDF- Claire Moyse-Faurie, Joachim Sabel, Claire Moyse-Faurie, Joachim Sabel(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
And it may be this unusual hight which explains the perception of a high fall in pitch. The structural variety for expressing exclamations found across languages, compared to other types of sentence types, might be due to the nature of what is conveyed by exclamations: they usually express deprecatory or appreciative feelings, excessive evaluation, surprise, astonishment and so on, i. e. they are expressions signaling much more complex speech acts than interrogative or directive ones. Not all languages show this variety in their encoding of exclamations, and most languages typically favor only some of the strategies. In some Indo-4. See for example the exclamative falling intonation contour described by Sohn (1975: 165) for Woleaian (Micronesia). Nominalization and exclamation in Oceanic languages 143 European languages (Germanic, and written French), for example, Exclamatives are typically based on interrogatives (even if the Subject Verb order is different) or declaratives. Still, this diversity is probably the reason why it seems justified for some linguists (K¨ onig and Siemund 2007: 317) to exclude Exclamatives from the list of basic sentence types: “So-called ‘exclamative sentences’ can simply be regarded as being the result of combining declarative or interroga-tive sentences with specific syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties, all of which are highly suitable and thus motivated for the expression of an exclama-tion”. A slightly different view is provided in one of the very few typological studies of exclamative constructions (Michaelis 2001). She regards exclama-tives as constructions, i.e. as a set of semantico-pragmatic features, all of which must receive formal expression.
- Casper de Groot, Kees Hengeveld, Casper de Groot, Kees Hengeveld(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Second, Exclamation is understood, here, in a rather restrictive sense: not all constructions with an exclamation mark (injunctive, optative, exhortative, etc.) are taken to be exclamative. 4.2. A typology of exclamative modality As pointed out above, data from the languages investigated reveal that an adequate account of the properties of exclamative constructions requires a further refinement of the notion of exclamative modality. In all these lan-guages, indeed, we find many kinds of constructions which are all labelled exclamative in grammar handbooks without further differentiation. A closer look at these constructions shows, however, that they are far from being synonymous. The following subsection presents a general typology of exclamative constructions based on two main criteria: a) the different values that exclamation can take and b) its different degrees. 4.2.1. Appreciative vs. depreciative exclamative modality A relatively large number of notions can be said to be subsumed by excla-mation. However, these notions can be, in general, reduced to two main subtypes which one can call 'appreciation' and 'depreciation'. The reaction of the speaker towards the surprising or unexpected content of some lin-guistic expression may indeed be either positive or negative, appreciative or depreciative. That appreciative vs. depreciative exclamation is a relevant modal distinction is evidenced by the fact that it co-determines the seman- 362 Ahmed Moutaouakil tic and formal properties of exclamative constructions. Let us consider, in this respect, the following sentence: (32) He has eaten everything that was on the table! (32) can be, contextually, interpreted as carrying either the speaker's ap-proval or his disapproval towards the propositional content, 'the fact that Peter has eaten everything that was on the table'. These two distinct mean-ings are mediated through two different prosodic contours.
eBook - PDF- Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
A social deictic element is most prominent in expletives, whose use strongly depends on the social setting and the intended audience (cf. Wilkins 1992: 149; Evans 1992: 236). Interjections are typically uttered as spontaneous, emo-tional reactions to a situation or to a sudden realisation after internal reflection. They frequently function as illocutionary force indicating devices (cf. Goddard 1998: 139; Wierzbicka 1986: 99; Nübling 2004: 20) and also have illocutionary force themselves (for a discussion cf. Ameka 1992; Wilkins 1992; Wierzbicka 1992; Sadock 1994). Ameka (1992: 113–114) distinguishes a number of communicative functions of interjections, noting that one and the same form may have multiple functions. Expressive interjections express the speaker’s mental state and are further subdi-vided into (i) emotive interjections, which “express the speaker’s state with re-spect to the emotions and sensations they have at the time”, e.g. ouch! ‘I feel pain’, and (ii) cognitive interjections, which “pertain to the state of knowledge and thoughts at the time of utterance”, e.g. aha! ‘I now know this’. Additionally, (iii) conative interjections “are directed at an auditor. They are either aimed at getting someone’s attention or they demand an action or response from someone”, e.g. sh! Interjections and expletives 317 ‘I want silence here’ or eh? ‘I want to know something’. The final class distin-guished by Ameka is (iv) phatic interjections, which “are used in the establishment and maintenance of communicative contact”, e.g. mhm! or uh-huh! . This last class shows the close affinity of interjections with the functional category of discourse markers 2 (cf. definition in chapter on discourse markers, this volume): some inter-jections can function as discourse markers and can have textual and interpersonal functions that facilitate communication.
eBook - PDFCorpus Pragmatics
A Handbook
- Karin Aijmer, Christoph Rühlemann(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
There is still much research to do in the area of exclamative utterances generally and in their relation to interjections in particular. Exclamatives are formulaic in many ways, and their relations to certain interjections seem to be formulaic as well. Thus, based on the corpora I have inspected, exclamative utterances typically occur with an initial interjection, and boy is by far the most frequent interjection heading exclamative utterances, based on searches for interjections and verb-initial clauses, but more sensitive corpora tagged for the various sorts of exclamative utterances will be needed to substantiate these findings and to suggest further interactions between Exclamatives, interjections and other formulaic means of expressing affect. 9.5 Marking constructed dialogue Research on constructed dialogue focused initially on proving that “reported speech is a misnomer” (Tannen 1989; see Mayes 1990, Chafe 1994), by demonstrating that much of what speakers construct as direct speech cannot represent verbatim recall of real talk. The appearance of the new markers like and all in American English storytelling, their distribution, functions and grammaticalization, have received much attention (see Romaine and Lange 1991, Ferrara and Bell 1995). Corpus researchers have noted that storytellers often have recourse to interjections to signal the onset of constructed dialogue: see Aijmer (1987: 83), Biber et al. (1999: 1118–1119) and Rühlemann (2007: 139–143). Rühlemann notes that interjections as constructed dialogue openers are predominantly used in passages including multiple instances of constructed speech, as in the example below, where each instance of dialogue begins with an interjection.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
