Exclamative sentences

This presentation assumes that conveying emotion (e.g. happiness, anger, fear, surprise, etc.) is a foundational element of verbal and non-verbal communication. Although a prominent topic of study among psychologists and anthropologists, emotion and its expression are often ignored by linguists and translation theorists, who instead tend to focus on other types of meaning. In this presentation, I offer first a brief sketch of some of the ways that emotion is communicated in language, and then I focus on a selection of grammatical constructions in English, Greek, and Hebrew where each has a prominent emotive component.

"The present study consists of two Romance syntax studies related to the uses of "que" ('that') particle: exclamative "que" and recomplementation (or Complementizer doubling).

In the first study (chapter 3) we analyze the nature of the particle "que" in wh-exclamative sentences. As a result of the microparametric analysis of exclamative sentences in Romance languages, we propose a unified analysis that helps explain the derivation of exclamatives in these languages, as well as the reason why this particle is optional in Spanish but it is not in Catalan. We propose a cartography for derive exclamative sentences from two different functional projections ---Factive Phrase and Force Phrase---, which enables us to provide evidence in favour of the Haegeman's (2004, 2006) hypothesis, whereby Force is merged immediately after the Finitness Phrase is projected.

In the second study, we examine the derivation of recomplementation in embedded clauses in the Iberoromance languages (Catalan, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese). After carrying out the background analysis, we focus on the description of the features of predicates that can selected such clauses. Then we analyse relevant examples of recomplementation order so to determine their function; finally we conclude that it is necessary to distinguish two types of structures: recomplementation in indicative clauses (cf. (1)) and recomplementation in subjunctive clauses (cf. (2)).

(1) Ha dit que1 els convidats (que2) estan asseguts a taula.
`He/She has said that the guests are seated at the table.'

(2) He dit que1 els convidats (que2) s'asseguin a taula.
`I have said that the guests (should) sit at the table.'

In (1) "que2" is used to set the boundaries between a reproduced discourse and the clausal elements that were implicit in the original discourse, which must be reintroduced in the new communicative situation because they are not shared by the interlocutor. Example (2) corresponds to an imperative clause in indirect speech, where a prominent element (e.g. a topic or a conditional clause) appears on the left periphery between the subordinating particle "que1" and the imperative indirect speech particle."

Based on a corpus made up of recordings from Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, this article investigates the phonology of exclamative utterances. It points out that the main characteristic phonological traits of exclamations are essentially suprasegmental and are to be observed at intonational level. After identifying some of the recurring characteristics of the intonation patterns used in exclamative utterances and showing that these can be explained by the fact that intonation is iconic and semantically motivated, this paper highlights the links between exclamation intonation and the expression of degree. Reflecting on the delimitative function of intonation and the illocutionary value of exclamations, it also suggests that the study of exclamative intonation sheds useful light on the nature of speech acts in spoken interactions.