Insights into the Syntax and Pragmatics of Exclamations and Other Expressive/ Emotional Utterances

Abstract

In linguistic literature there are many discussions and descriptions of linguistic phenomena such as expressive utterances, exclamatory utterances, expressive sentences, exclamations, exclamatives, and expressive speech acts. Linguists have observed that there are emotionally triggered utterances in most languages, but there seems to be no consensus regarding which terminology to use when discussing the phenomena in question (Beijer, 2003:2). Neither do the phenomena seem properly defined. In sum, there is a need for better definitions of the terms used, and in order to produce better definitions we have to acquire a better understanding of the phenomena at hand. This paper is an attempt at improving the present situation.