Exclamation in English and Arabic: a contrastive Study dr. Nadia Amin Hasan
- Co-occurrence with interjections
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Exclamation in English and Arabic A Cont
1- Co-occurrence with interjections:Exclamations give expression to the speaker's affective stance or attitude. Sometimes an exclamation is realized by an interjection which is a word or a sound used to express a sudden feeling or emotion. Interjections belong to the oldest form of the spoken language and represent the most primitive type of utterance. Sometimes an exclamatory construction co-occurs with interjections. Interjections are a mark of emotive emphasis in speech. The most common interjections in English as explained by Svartvik & Leech (1985 :117) Oh! = surprise Ah! = satisfaction Aha! = jubilant satisfaction or recognition Wow! = great surprise Yippee! = excitement or delight Outch or ou! = pain Ugh! = disgust Eckersely & Eckersely (1981: 315) add the following to the list Hello! = surprise in addition to its use as a greeting Hey! = to attract attention Alas! = a literary form expressing sorrow or disappointment They comment that the interjections 'oh!' is sometimes written 'O'. Then, it may have the force of a verb particularly in rhetorical speech. O that I had done what he told me (ibid: 316) O is followed by a noun clause. The same applies to 'alas' meaning I am sorry. (ibid: 335) Thi Ven (2012: 2) states that Interjection can appear either before or after an exclamative expression. He cites the following examples: Ah! Here they are! What a crazy cat that was, whoo! 2- Subordination to factive epistemic verbs: This property, factivity, was first pointed out by Grimshaw (1979 qtd in zanutti and porter 2003: 19). Factivity presupposes that the propositional content of the clause is true. Michaelis (2001) differentiates between main clause exclamative and constructions containing exclamative complements. In main clause exclamatives, factivity is realized by an abstract factive morpheme. In other constructions, factivity is realized syntactically by embedding the clause under one of the factive verbs, e.g. know, agree, realize, etc. when they are embedded under a verb like know or realize, in the present tense and with a first person subject, this verb cannot be negated, as seen in the following: I don‟t know/realize how very cute he is. Factivity may also be realized by embedding clauses under classes other than factive verbs. 'Adjectives and noun construction', comments Crystal (1997:147), 'may display factivity, as in it's surprising that he left and it's a shame that he left.' Anaphoric degree adverbs, Rett (2008) concluded that when languages use degree words other than question words in exclamative constructions, these are anaphoric degree words analogous to so(in English and German), Italian cosı´, and French tellement. . Question words: An exclamative construction may take an information-question form. Subject and finite verb inversion: Right Dislocation:- Michaelis (2001: 1043) adds that an exclamative sentence type may invoke right dislocated or unlinked topic as in She’s pretty sharp, my mom. That’s certainly a shame, that he’s not willing to discuss it. In her semantic account of exclamation, Rett (2008) assumes that there are two semantic restrictions on exclamatives: degree and evaluativity restrictions. She states that 'For the utterance of an exclamative to be expressively correct, its content must additionally be about a degree, and that degree must exceed a contextually relevant standard. (Rett, 2008: 601). Exclamation, she affirms, should also be judged on the basis the evaluativity restriction, i.e. an exclamation is expressively correct if it is used to express surprise at the content of the exclamation, and if this content is salient. … The content of the exclamative must additionally be objectively surprising; specifically, the degree in question must be high relative to a contextual standard. (Rett, 2008: 607)Thus, she concludes 'that any construction which denotes a degree property can be used to utter an exclamative' (Rett, 2008: 612). In addition and as deduced from the above review of literature, the semantic criteria of judging exclamation can be summarized as follows: The expression of a high or extreme position on a semantic scale or relative to a contextual standard Deviation from a norm Exclamatory utterances are emphatic. They are assertions. 4- Exclamatory utterances express the speaker's affective stance, positive or negative. They are overlaid by an emotive element tải về 54.19 Kb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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