What is it about?
My study examines so-called wh-exclamatives (How wonderful this is! What a genius she was!) in three different Present-Day English genres, namely prose fiction, personal letters and informal face-to-face conversation. The results of the corpus study are somewhat surprising because they show that 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. The results compel us to consider that exclamatives might be more specialized than has been believed so far.
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Why is it important?
I believe this is the first corpus linguistics study that addresses the importance of text types in research on exclamatives. My results show that there seems to be a correlationship between genre and type of exclamative that is chosen, and that exclamatives fulfill very different functions in each. Finally, some of the outcomes are quite puzzling: why do people exclaim so frequently in letters?
Perspectives
Writing this article proved to be both a challenge and a pleasure - it was challenging because my results contradict many previously held beliefs. At the same time, it proved to be a pleasure as I was able to contribute important evidence to the linguistic discussion, which might lead to some reconsiderations of some hitherto unquestioned truths.
Daniela Schröder
University of Münster
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The genre specifics of English wh-exclamatives, Functions of Language, June 2023, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/fol.22013.sch.
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