Exclamative Clauses Research Articles

Exclamativas encubiertas en español

Abstract Since Bosque (1982; 1984a) extrapolated to Spanish grammar the concept of concealed exclamation introduced by Elliot (1971; 1974) and Grimshaw (1979), the analysis of determiner phrases (DPs) such as los libros que le gustan in Ya te imaginas los libros que le gustan and la altura del edificio in Me sorprendió la altura del edificio has not been homogeneous. While some authors agree in analyzing both DPs as concealed exclamations (DPs semantically equivalent to indirect exclamative clauses and arguments of an explicit predicate), others confine this analysis to the latter DP. They analyze the former either as a clause with exclamative import subordinate to an explicit predicate (a quantified clause or a complement clause) or as a DP with exclamative import providing the argument for an explicit predicate which they do not consider a concealed exclamation, but a nominal exclamative structure or a nominal emphatic relative construction. Our goals are: 1) to review the analyses proposed so far for this type of structures, and 2) to put forward an analysis of these DPs characterizing them not as arguments of an explicit predicate, but as genuine DPs that are remnants of grammatical ellipsis. Specifically, they are argued to be subjects of elliptical clauses that are simultaneously indirect exclamatives and predicational copular clauses.

«¡La de + N + que…!» The Feminine Definite Article in Spanish Exclamative Clauses

The present study explores the exclamative use of the feminine definite article la in structures such as ‘¡La de chicos que besé en la fiesta!’ (How many guys I kissed at the party!). First, a morphosyntactic description of the pattern is offered so as to show that the data under analysis are pseudopartitive constructions which display all the characteristics of primary and partial exclamatives. Building on research on nominal exclamatives, we conclude that these examples are not CPs but indefinite DPs with an exclamative flavor which contain a semi-relative clause introduced by que. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, we schematize a set of syntactic structures which capture the ‘chimeric’ and hybrid nature of the data, these being halfway between DPs and exclamative clauses. In order to do so, it will be necessary to split the DP into smaller projections (FocP, FinP), since la must move to Spec-FocP to be interpreted as an exclamative operator.

Cº realizations along the left edge across English and Spanish

This paper investigates the lexicalization of the complementizer that/que in English and Spanish varieties in different contexts along the left edge of the clause. This is performed through discussion of a range of constructions traditionally attributed to the CP domain/left periphery, primarily (but not only) in certain embedded clauses. The ubiquity of that/que, that is, the lexical realization of that/que in subordinating environments, exclamative clauses, interrogative contexts, and subjunctive clauses, amongst others, sheds light not only on the characterization of the relevant constructions but also on the make-up of the left edge of the clause. The fact that such realizations can be obligatory, optional, or, on occasion, impossible, sometimes depending on the variety in question, furthers our understanding of head lexicalizations while contributing to macro and microvariation studies in syntactic theory. In so doing, this paper paves the way for holistic investigations devoted to complementizer realization in the head position of different left-edge-related constructions and in different linguistic varieties.

AN ANALYSIS OF SONGS ABOUT MOTHER BY NGUYEN VAN TY FROM SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVE

This paper explores experiential meaning realized in transitivity resource and interpersonal meaning realized in the mood and modality resources of two songs about mother by Nguyen Van Ty. The discussion of the experiential and interpersonal meaning explored will enable the researcher to have a better understanding of the image of mother depicted in the two songs. The theoretical framework employed for analysis is Systemic Functional Linguistics. The data for analysis is all clause simplexes collected from the two songs. The findings show that material process is mostly used in both songs and followed by mental, relational and behavioural processes. There are no verbal and existential processes found in both songs. In terms of interpersonal meaning, there is a very high frequency of declarative clauses and a very small number of interrogative and exclamative clauses. Although the occurrence of modality is very humble, it is deployed in both songs. It is recommended that the two songs can be used as an effective source for students who take an interest in studying the Vietnamese language from Systemic Functional Linguistics view.

The (en)rich(ed) meaning of expletive negation

Abstract This contribution addresses the issue of one of the instances of non-standard negation, the so-called expletive negation (EN). Though it discusses data from a variety of languages, it mainly concentrates on Italian, proposing that the behavior of EN in comparative, exclamative and temporal clauses warrants an analysis of EN in terms of an operator of implicature denial. This approach derives the fact that EN is truth-conditionally irrelevant from the fact that the semantics of negation as a truth-value reversal operator is shifted, in the case of EN, to the layer of implicated meaning. The analysis has a number of interesting consequences for the notion of metalinguistic negation. It further derives many of the interpretive effects normally linked to the so-called evaluative analysis of EN, and is compatible with a new set of data showing that EN scopally interacts with other negative elements. Finally, the proposal advanced here has a number of non-trivial implications regarding the relation between morphosyntax and the systems of interpretation, potentially affecting the standard view of language within cognition.

The Analysis of English – Indonesian Exclamative Clauses in The Novel Entitled the Adventures of Tom Sawyer By Mark Twain and Their Indonesian Version Entitled Petualangan Tom Sawyer Translated By Djokolelono

This paper is about the analysis of exclamative clause which is occurred in English novel and its translation into Indonesian. Some theories are used to support the analysis, the theory of translation by Nida and Taber (1974) and also types of sentences by Quirk (1976). The analysis found there are two types of exclamative clause, i.e. interjection and exclamative sentences in the novel as the data of this study. The form of the exclamative sentences are not only marked by a noun phrase but also an adjective phrase. The structure of both texts (SL and TL) syntactically could be translated into the same or different structure, while the SL are mostly translated or equivalent into TL by the same forms. The changes of information do not change the main idea from the SL so the message can be transferred the same in TL. The result of this study shows that there are variations of translation of the English exclamative clause into Indonesian, which include the communicative functions of the sentence.

Different Languages – Different Sentence Types? On Exclamative Sentences

AbstractIt is not equally easy for all languages to establish an exclamative sentence type. It seems the easiest for those languages that feature a morphological marking for an exclamative sentence type like Turkish or Vietnamese. English on the other hand is a language that does not mark exclamative clauses with an easily identifiable marker but uses certain preferred constructions, which allow us to separate a class of ‘exclamative sentences’ from other sentence types. However, there is another class of languages for which it is even harder to determine if ‘exclamative sentences’ exist as a sentence type. In those languages, these sentences share a striking amount of formal properties with sentences used for different speech acts. German is a case in point, and we will look at the properties of exclamative sentences in this language in detail.

Exclamative clauses in English and their relevance for theories of clause types

In the present study, I investigate the grammar and usage of English exclamative clauses of the typeWhat a wonderful journey this is!andHow wonderful this journey is!Building on existing research, I argue that the exclamative clause type can be motivated both syntactically and semantically/pragmatically. In the main part of my study, I offer a usage-based analysis of English exclamative clauses drawing on data from theBritish National Corpusand theInternational Corpus of English, British Component. I consider 703 tokens ofwhat-exclamatives and 645 tokens ofhow-exclamatives. My analysis reveals that English exclamatives typically occur in reduced form lacking an overt verbal predicate, i.e.What a wonderful journey!orHow wonderful!I provide an explanation for the predominance of reduced forms based on the semantico-pragmatic properties of exclamations. Moreover, I argue that the usage properties of exclamatives render it a marginal clause type, as it is highly infrequent and predominantly appears in non-clausal forms. Usage data point to a cline of clause types as the more appropriate approximation of reality instead of the familiar distinction between major and minor clause types.

Gradation in modified AdjPs

The goal of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the composition processes underlying DegPs headed by "how" that include an adjective that is in turn modified. These include "how extremely high", "how politically incorrect" and "how damn important". The focus here is on adverbs such as "extremely", which have been used in the literature on exclamatives as a test of exclamativity, but which have not been given to this date a compositional semantics. I argue that, even if this has been challenged in the literature for Remarkably adverbs such as "surprisingly", "extremely" is a degree predicate, where degrees are not construed as positive numbers on a scale but rather as equivalence classes of individuals (Cresswell 1976). This research has interesting ramifications for the analysis of degree expressions "how" and "so" vs. "very" and "enough) and for the distinction between interrogative and exclamative clauses.

Gradation in modified AdjPs

The goal of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the composition processes underlying DegPs headed by "how" that include an adjective that is in turn modified. These include "how extremely high", "how politically incorrect" and "how damn important". The focus here is on adverbs such as "extremely", which have been used in the literature on exclamatives as a test of exclamativity, but which have not been given to this date a compositional semantics. I argue that, even if this has been challenged in the literature for Remarkably adverbs such as "surprisingly", "extremely" is a degree predicate, where degrees are not construed as positive numbers on a scale but rather as equivalence classes of individuals (Cresswell 1976). This research has interesting ramifications for the analysis of degree expressions "how" and "so" vs. "very" and "enough) and for the distinction between interrogative and exclamative clauses.

English Nominal Clauses: Analyzing the Translation of Subordinate wh – Interrogative Clauses and Infinitive wh - Clauses in Azeri

This paper considers the Azeri translation of English nominal clauses with subordinate wh –interrogative clauses in complex sentences. Moreover, in this research, infinitive wh – clauses have been studied. Based on Quirk et alʼs classification of nominal clauses (clauses approximating in function noun phrases) ,they fall into six major categories: That –clause or subordinate declarative clauses, Subordinate interrogative clauses, Subordinate exclamative clauses, Nominal relative clauses, To - infinitive clauses and Ing clauses. An infinitive wh – clause can be formed with all wh –words. The infinitive clause has an sense .In this paper, the data are drawn from studies based on the English – Azeri translated fictions. According to the results of the present study, 78% of these sentences in Azeri, translated as simple sentences involving verbal combinations, 12% translated as simple sentences without verbal combinations, 6% translated as complex sentences and 4% translated as compound sentences. Regarding the structures involving infinitive construction, the findings indicate that 68% translated as simple sentences consisting verbal combinations, and 32% translated as complex sentences. It can be said that, in Azeri, there is a tendency of using simple sentences instead of compound or complex ones. The results of this research also show that there are some mistranslations regarding the nominal clauses involving both wh –interrogative and infinitive constructions, due to ignoring of the obligational sense of these clauses in Azeri translation, the percentage of these mistranslations is 86%. In this research, the most frequent wh –interrogative word used in original texts, is what in 32 sentences and the least one, is whom in 7 sentences, in addition, the most frequent wh – interrogative word used in subordinates involving both wh – words and infinitive construction in original texts is how with the percentage of 53% and the least one is where with the percentage 11%.

Exclamatives in Scandinavian*

Abstract. In this article, I define exclamatives pragmatically, as a speech act which contains an assertion, and where there is a mismatch between this assertion and a presupposition. The assertion normally expresses a higher degree than expected, i.e. they are scalar. The speech act is instantiated in various ways in the Scandinavian languages. The aim of this article is to describe and characterise the syntactic variation in Scandinavian exclamative clauses, in the standard languages, as well as in some regional variants. First, I discuss the definition of exclamatives, and I recognise three main types, which I call degree, polar and reinforcing exclamatives. Second, I give a survey of the syntactic variation of the three types in Scandinavian, where I discuss syntactic properties such as word order and extraction possibilities as well as lexical, syntactic and prosodic features that are exclusive to exclamatives. Last, I conclude the paper by a taxonomy of exclamatives in Scandinavian.

Using large corpora of conversation to investigate narrative

This article describes a hybrid corpus linguistic approach to conversational storytelling, whereby one first identifies a feature of interest in a small set of narratives, then moves to a general investigation of this feature in large corpora of transcribed conversation, focusing only later on the distribution and functions of this feature within narrative portions of the corpora investigated. Interjections are conversational units par excellence with no syntactic relation to adjacent clauses, so that investigation of large corpora is particularly vital for determining their patterning and functions in conversation. I show that interjections play a number of important roles in the organization of conversational storytelling, first in justifying tellability, next in marking narrative climaxes, particularly within constructed dialogue, then in evaluating the narrative point, and finally in receiving and commenting on the storytelling performance. I further describe combinations of interjections and the interaction of interjections with exclamative clauses.

Word order in Hungarian exclamatives

This paper gives a syntactic overview and analysis of exclamative constructions in Hungarian. Its main purpose is to describe word order variation in exclamative clauses, in comparison with other sentence types. The formal properties of exclamatives that will be discussed here have important consequences for the theories of exclamatives and exclamativity in general. The empirical findings will force one to reconsider the syntactic theory of exclamatives put forward by Portner and Zanuttini (2003). The key modification affects the role focus plays in exclamatives: it will be shown that languages can use available syntactic means of focusing in the expression of exclamatives.

Exclamative clauses in English

This study aims to complement the theoretical and descriptive literature on exclamative clauses in English by providing a comprehensive description of their structural and semantic properties. The exclamative clause type, it is argued, must be restricted to constructions with an initial exclamative phrase containing what (as modifier) or how (as modifier or adjunct), insofar as it is only in these that the illocutionary force of exclamatory statement has been grammaticalised. A number of tendencies are revealed by the corpus-interrogation, including: the occurrence of ambiguity resulting from the structural similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses, especially in the case of subordinate exclamatives; the reduction of exclamative clauses—particularly what-exclamatives—to just the exclamative phrase; and, the relative favouring of how exclamatives in formal, written discourse.

Pied piping is a local dependency

To model the pied piping in interrogative and exclamative clauses Ginzburg & Sag (2000) proposes a nonlocal head-driven treatment, thus emphasizing the resemblances with extraction. This treatment has a number of drawbacks: it relies on poorly motivated lexical rules and nonbranching phrase structure rules, it makes false predictions about pied piping in PPs, and it presupposes an implausible structure for NPs with predeterminers. To solve these problems I propose an alternative in which pied piping is treated as a local functor-driven dependency. Technically, the WH feature is integrated in the CATEGORY objects, and the propagation of its values is modeled by constraints which are independently needed for the treatment of other phenomena.

Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax-Semantics Interface Raffaella Zanuttini and Paul Portner A central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less wellstudied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamental syntactic components which identify a clause as exclamative, a factive and a wh-operator. These are crucial because they are responsible for two fundamental semantic properties characteristic of exclamatives, namely that they are factive and denote a set of alternative propositions. The force of exclamatives, which we characterize as widening, is derived indirectly, based on the semantic properties.* 1. Exclamatives and the notion of clause type Sadock and Zwicky (1985) define clause types as a pairing of grammatical form and conversational use.1 In this article we use this notion of clause type as we examine one of the less commonly discussed types, exclamatives. Within the class of exclamatives we include sentences like What a nice guy he is!, which associate a variety of syntactic features with a specific conversational use. In general, scholars have approached the characterization of clause types in a way that is very natural given a definition like Sadock and Zwicky’s: they ask how the conversational use is represented in the form. There are two main approaches here. On the one hand, one finds analyses that postulate a morpheme or grammatical feature representing a sentence’s illocutionary force. On the other, there are construction-oriented theories that characterize a class of structures and link this class to the pragmatic use directly and as a whole. We believe both of these perspectives leave out a level of analysis: the sentence’s denotation, that is, compositional semantic interpretation.2 The denotation mediates the form/use relationship and plays a crucial role in the analysis of both sides of the pairing. In terms of form, we propose that the class of exclamative structures is defined as comprising those which encode two crucial properties of meaning. A sentence is an exclamative if its denotation has these two properties. We investigate in some detail the syntactic characteristics of this class of sentences, focusing in particular on how the crucial aspects of meaning are represented. In terms of use, we suggest that the [End Page 39] two semantic properties in question imply that the sentence’s use is as an exclamative, provided that we understand the notion of use properly. We spend a significant proportion of the article clarifying the relevant concept of use and its application to exclamatives. Let us provide more detail about our proposals. We identify two syntactic properties that define the class of exclamatives: (1) a. Exclamatives contain a wh operator-variable structure. b. Exclamatives contain an abstract morpheme FACT in the CP domain. These two properties characterize exclamatives because they contribute the two crucial components of meaning to the denotation. (2) a. Exclamatives denote a set of alternative propositions, a result of the operator-variable structure. b. Exclamatives are factive, that is, their propositional content is presupposed; this presuppositionality is the result of the abstract morpheme FACT, which is thus an example of the factive morpheme proposed in previous literature on complement clauses. These aspects of our proposal explain the similarities across languages between exclamatives and interrogatives. Since both denote sets of propositions, their syntax is alike in respects that give rise to this aspect of their meanings. The need to host the abstract morpheme expressing factivity explains certain subtle differences between exclamatives and interrogatives that have been noted in the literature on Romance. The ‘use’ of exclamatives is analyzed in terms of another fundamental concept, that of widening. (3) Exclamatives widen the domain of quantification for the wh operator, which gives rise to the set of alternative propositions denoted by the sentence. Widening allows us to capture those aspects of the meaning of exclamatives which have been informally described as ‘a sense of surprise’, ‘unexpectedness’, ‘extreme degree’, and the like. Widening is not in general directly encoded in the syntax; it is, however, derived from the...

Exclamative clauses at the syntax-semantics interface

Exclamative clauses exhibit a structural diversity which raises the question of whether they form a clause type in the sense of Sadock & Zwicky (1985). Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we argue that the class of exclamatives is syntactically characterizable in terms of a pair of abstract syntactic properties. Moreover, we propose that these properties encode two components of meaning which uniquely define the semantics and pragmatics of exclarnatives. Overall, our paper is a contribution to the study of the syntaxlsemantics interface and offers a new perspective on the notion of clause type.

The characterization of exclamative clauses in Paduan

In this descriptive report we outline the structural pattern of exclamative clauses in Paduan. Because of the close similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses in this language, we begin by developing a number of tests which allow us to distinguish these two clause types. We then present the range of exclamative structures. A variety of factors interact to mark a clause as an exclamative, yielding a quite complex array of facts. We view this work as the basis for future study in the syntax and semantics of exclamatives.

The Characterization of Exclamative Clauses in Paduan

The Characterization of Exclamative Clauses in Paduan