Premium
Different Languages – Different Sentence Types? On Exclamative Sentences
Author(s) -
d'Avis Franz
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
language and linguistics compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619
H-Index - 44
ISSN - 1749-818X
DOI - 10.1111/lnc3.12181
Subject(s) - sentence , computer science , linguistics , german , class (philosophy) , feature (linguistics) , natural language processing , point (geometry) , distinctive feature , artificial intelligence , vietnamese , turkish , atomic sentence , mathematics , philosophy , geometry
It is not equally easy for all languages to establish an exclamative sentence type. It seems the easiest for those languages that feature a morphological marking for an exclamative sentence type like Turkish or Vietnamese. English on the other hand is a language that does not mark exclamative clauses with an easily identifiable marker but uses certain preferred constructions, which allow us to separate a class of ‘exclamative sentences’ from other sentence types. However, there is another class of languages for which it is even harder to determine if ‘exclamative sentences’ exist as a sentence type. In those languages, these sentences share a striking amount of formal properties with sentences used for different speech acts. German is a case in point, and we will look at the properties of exclamative sentences in this language in detail.