Exclamation in English and Arabic: a contrastive Study dr. Nadia Amin Hasan
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Exclamation in English and Arabic A Cont-đã chuyển đổi
| I.1. Review of literature:
Michaelis (2001: 1038) has conducted a typological survey of the coding of exclamatives as they 'form a variegated class both within and across languages'. She worked with examples from French, German, Turkish, Setswana and Korean. Exclamatory utterances assert that the degree in question is higher than the speaker would generally expect. Exclamative constructions, concluded Michaelis (2001:1042) are characterized by some formal and semantic features. Fabian Beijir's paper (2002) attempts to settle matters concerning the too many terminology used to describe expressive/emotional utterance. Some of the terminologies used are EXPRESSIVE UTTERANCES, EXCLAMATORY UTTERANCES, EXPRESSIVE SENTENCES, EXCLAMATIONS, EXCLAMATIVES, and EXPRESSIVE SPEECH ACTS. He came up with the conclusion that ' if the proposition in an expressive/emotional utterance indicates a high or extreme position on a semantic scale, and a deviation from a norm, this expressive/emotional utterance is an exclamative. He, then, sorted out five types of exclamatives: 1- Prototypical exclamatives, 2- Exclamatives with interrogative form, 3- Such (a) and so exclamatives, 4- Exclamative that-clauses and to-infinitive clauses, 5-DPs used as exclamatives Zanutti and Porter (2003) study exclamatives as they are a "less well-studied clause types" and to detect whether force is represented in syntax. They note that clause types like exclamatives are detected by some distinguishing semantic characteristics. They point out three properties which distinguish exclamative clauses and show how they give rise to criteria which help pick out members of this class. The three properties are: factivity, scalar implicature and inability to function in question/ answer pairs. Factivity means that their propositional content is presupposed. It is a property that presupposes the truth of the proposition expressed by that clause Scalar implicature, on the other hand, indicates that the proposition they denote lies at the extreme end of some contextually given scale". Thus, if we say 'how very difficult the exam is!, this indicates that the degree of its difficulty is greater than the alternatives under consideration, and this aspect of its meaning can be labelled an implicature because it goes beyond the sentence‟s truth- conditional meaning. They conclude that force can't be inferred by any element in particular in syntax. Rather, clause types like exclamatives are detected by some distinguishing semantic characteristics. Their work on exclamatives falls within the domain of Construction Grammar. They follow the line of Michaelis and Lambrech (1996) but with a somewhat different approach. . Peter Collins (2004) conducts an empirical study of exclamative clauses in English, which is intended to complement the accounts presented both in the comprehensive reference grammars and in the more theoretically-oriented literature (e.g. Michaelis and Lambrecht 1996; and Zanuttini and Portner 2003). He argued that the exclamative clause type is to be limited to constructions with an initial exclamative phrase containing what (as modifier) or how (as modifier or adjunct), since only in these has there been a International journal of Science Commerce and Humanities Volume No 2 No 2 February 2014 176 grammaticalisation of the illocutionary force of exclamatory statement. .Ana C. P. (2004) investigated a subclass of exclamative construction in Brazilian Portuguese characterized by a negative-bias inference. . Castroviejo Mir´o (2008) proceeded from the claim that the semantics of exclamatives is a challenging topic of linguistic research since their status as clause type is not well-defined. She concentrated on embedded exclamatives and conducted a comparison between English and Catalan. Christopher Potts and Florian Schwarz (2008) build logistic regression models and use the resulting statistics to state general, corpus- and language-independent hypotheses about what it means to be an exclamative pragmatically. These hypotheses allow us to identify previously unnoticed exclamatives, and they highlight the importance of purely expressive meanings. Rett (2008) proposes a semantic account of exclamations. The account relies on an important distinction between „proposition exclamations‟ (exclamations expressed with declarative sentences, as in 1) and „exclamatives‟ (exclamations expressed with wh-clauses, definite DPs and inversion constructions, as in 2. (1) Sue wore orange shoes! (2) a. (My,) How orange Sue‟s shoes were! In her paper (2011), she provides a semantic and pragmatic account of exclamations. She draws on work in degree semantics to explain why exclamatives can and must receive a particular type of degree interpretation. Sæbø's (2010) challenge has been to defend, in the face of potential counterevidence, the hypothesis that interrogatives and exclamatives have basically the same denotations. Kaufman's article (2010) examines the morphology and syntax of two types of nominalizations: exclamative formation and temporal subordination across a wide range of Austronesian languages. Thi Vinch To (2012) investigated some typical structures in English and Vietnamese. He also analyzed the uses of these sentences in performing the illocutionary acts known as the exclamatory acts in the speech act theory. He proceeded from the contention that there was less attention paid to the pragmatic perspective in dealing with exclamatives while interest was paid to morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of Vietnamese. He concluded that exclamatory sentences in English are used to show the following illocutionary acts: surprise, excitement, compliment, painfulness, promise and comfort; while in Vietnamese they show the first four acts only. Depending on the subject, object and the speaker's feelings, exclamative acts can be internal, external, unconscious and conscious in both English and Vietnamese. Chernilovskaya et al (2012) contended that utterances of wh-exclamative clauses convey two distinct implications: descriptive and expressive content and they focus on the context change effect of exclamatives assuming that their denotation is some semantic object that can be turned into a proposition corresponding to their descriptive content. In a reply to the claim that exclamatives signal a mental state, they argue that: 'instead, we claim that they signal a mental occurrence, that is, a mental/emotive event. Exclamatives are used when the speaker is „struck‟ by something (or pretends to be). tải về 250.88 Kb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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