Exclaiming in different English text types
What is it about?
My study examines so-called wh-exclamatives (How wonderful this is! What a genius she was!) in three different Present-Day English genres, namely prose fiction, personal letters and informal face-to-face conversation. The results of the corpus study are somewhat surprising because they show that wh-exclamatives are most frequent in personal letters, a genre which has hitherto not been linked with exclamatives. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate that each genre shows a different distribution of exclamatives. The results compel us to consider that exclamatives might be more specialized than has been believed so far.
Why is it important?
I believe this is the first corpus linguistics study that addresses the importance of text types in research on exclamatives. My results show that there seems to be a correlationship between genre and type of exclamative that is chosen, and that exclamatives fulfill very different functions in each. Finally, some of the outcomes are quite puzzling: why do people exclaim so frequently in letters?