Syntactic strategies of exclamatives

Abstract

The study presented in this paper has two aims. First, it establishes pragmasemantic features of exclamations and exclamatives relying on three formulated approaches – a constructional approach, a presupposition approach, and a scalarity approach, and suggests distinguishing proper exclamatives, the syntactic structures of which are conventionally associated with an illocutionary force of expressivity, from improper ones that do not have such an association. Second, involving the data of 45 languages, the paper reveals and describes 5 syntactic strategies of exclamatives, which are as follows: subject-verb inversion, subordinate clauses, noun phrases, anaphoric adverbs and adjectives, and wh-phrases. The latter three are further divided into several sub-strategies

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