Exclamativity in discourse : exploring the exclamative speech act from a discourse perspective

Abstract

This dissertation studies the phenomenon of exclamativity. It suggests a formal definition of the exclamative speech act based on a discourse perspective. In the literature wh-exclamative sentences, such as "What a delicious dessert John baked!", are mostly studied from a semantic perspective. Various semantic theories of wh-exclamatives have been suggested, focussing on the denotation of this type of sentences. What is often left outside of consideration is how uttering such a sentence affects the conversation. The context-change effect of wh-exclamatives is sometimes associated with the notion of "exclaiming", which has not been formally defined in the literature. This dissertation sets out to define the exclamative speech act from a discourse perspective, on the basis of a case study of wh-exclamatives. The central assumption here is that studying the discourse behaviour of such sentences provides useful information for defining the exclamative speech act. The discourse properties of wh-exclamative sentences are thoroughly investigated based on naturally occurring examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Subsequently, the exclamative speech act operator is defined in a model of context. This study thus provides an answer to the question what the context-change effect of uttering a wh-exclamative sentence is. The discourse perspective taken in this dissertation suggests new directions for analysing various speech acts.