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.
Published online: 30 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.17028.hei
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