On the status of wh-exclamatives in English

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-233
Author(s):  
Bernd Heine ◽  
Gunther Kaltenböck ◽  
Tania Kuteva

Abstract Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of Discourse Grammar. It is argued that the structure of exclamatives can be related to other sentence types in terms of discourse strategies that are used for constructing texts, in particular by means of cooptation, a cognitive-communicative strategy that enables speakers to use existing text pieces for new discourse functions.

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Hannay ◽  
Caroline Kroon

In modelling the discourse–grammar interface, a central question concerns the status of discourse act as the minimal unit of discourse organization and its relation to units of grammatical structure. This paper seeks to clarify the notion of act by defining it as a strategic rather than a conceptual unit, and by setting out a classification of strategic acts. Illustration is then offered for the position that discourse acts are to a very considerable extent realized in English by intonation units and punctuation units. This is done by considering how punctuational variation and cases of intonation/syntax mismatch can be explained in terms of the specific discourse contribution of the units concerned. Although the correlation between discourse acts and intonation/punctuation units remains problematic, in that there may not be a 1 : 1 correspondence, it is still attractive — at least for English — to see the linguistic correlate of acts in intonation and punctuation units rather than in syntactic structures. The paper finishes by considering the implications for the formalizing of relations between discourse, semantics and syntax in Functional Discourse Grammar.


Author(s):  
A. P. Kryachkova

RETRACTEDThe main definitions of political discourse are introduced in this article. The author also suggests her own definition of this term. The participants of political discourse use various communicative strategies in order to influence opponents. The article reviews various definitions of communicative strategy term. The author gives her own definition of communicative strategy term and describes the main political discourse strategies. The purpose of the article is to review defamation strategy implementation and to identify its role in political discourse of Germany based on Bundestag's political wrangling. The author describes the main tactics and conversational turns of defamation strategy and its development in German politicians' speech image. Defamation strategy is one of the leading strategies in any aggressive verbal behavior discourse. The research describes main communicant's intentions by using of defamation strategy. The addresser uses this kind of strategy to offend the opponent's positive image aiming to undermine opponent's credibility and to reduce his significance at the political stage. There are following tactics of defamation strategy: offence, accusation, jeer. The article reviews the functioning of named tactics in political discourse of Germany. The article describes special aspects of above listed tactics, distinguishes terms of offence and accusation, gives examples from Bundestag's political speeches. Every tactic has its conversational turns, that are realized by various linguistic means. The article analyses political comments as an evaluative lexis subject. It also suggests analysis of such turns as intensification, comment's metaphoricity, comparative constractions, that promote better perlocutionary effect.


2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty J. Birner

Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.  


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2(22)) ◽  
pp. 82-88
Author(s):  
Liudmyla Strii

The article is devoted to the development of a typology of communicative strategies presented in the ritual genres of the presidential discourse of Ukraine. Greetings, addresses and inaugural speeches of all Ukrainian presidents are considered in order to highlight and characterize the selected strategies of communication with the recipients. The communicative strategy is interpreted as a general scheme, a plan for the implementation of the communicative plan, which involves the use of specific speech actions (tactics and appropriate language tools. In presidential discourse strategies of consolidation, self-presentation and agitation are singled out. It is proved that the strategy of consolidation realizes the intention to unite the president with the people, the strategy of self-presentation - the presentation of the president as an extraordinary person, the politician-legend, the strategy of agitation - the motivation to support the politician-speaker. Each strategy is implemented using appropriate communication tactics and language tools.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo ◽  
Esther Linares-Bernabéu

AbstractThis paper aims to explore subversive humor in Spanish stand-up comedy by analyzing the work of two well-known Spanish female comedians, Eva Hache and Patricia Sornosa. In order to reach this goal, a corpus of these comedians’ performances has been collected, comprising a total of 25 monologues, which have been divided into humorous sequences, which come to a total of 76 in the corpus of Eva Hache and 37 for Patricia Sornosa. The qualitative and quantitative analysis has focused on subversive humorous sequences, which has shown that only 22.38% of the sequences from Eva Hache’s comic monologues are mainly built around subverting the status quo, whereas Patricia Sornosa challenges the heteronormative discourse in most of her sequences (87.93%). Further, in this case study, we have examined the main linguistic techniques they use when challenging the heteronormative standards, namely the topics, targets, discourse strategies and linguistic cues used to generate a subversive effect. Findings show that both comics use subversive humor but in different ways because of contextual constraints. Whilst Patricia Sornosa offers an overt critique, Eva Hache disparages in a subtler manner even when teasing and undermining male power.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 284-306
Author(s):  
Hongmei Fang ◽  
Kees Hengeveld

AbstractIt has been widely claimed in the literature that the sentence-final particle ba in Mandarin Chinese is a modal element. This article argues against this claim and shows that ba is an element that has a unified mitigating function with scope over the utterance as a whole. Using the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), and more specifically its hierarchical, layered organization, the article provides several arguments that support this new classification of ba. First, ba, like mitigators in general, but unlike modal elements, can occur in sentences with different basic illocutions. Second, ba may co-occur with modal elements of all different subtypes and thus cannot be a modal element itself. Third, ba may occur in sentences in which the speaker is highly confident of the propositional content. Fourth, unlike modal elements, ba may occur in certain types of non-propositional utterances. And fifth, the position that ba occupies with respect to other sentence-final particles shows that it has scope over the utterance as a whole. After thus arguing for the status of ba as a mitigator, we show how the general mitigating function of ba can acquire the more specific mitigating effects that have previously been attributed to it in the literature.


Author(s):  
L.J. Chen ◽  
Y.F. Hsieh

One measure of the maturity of a device technology is the ease and reliability of applying contact metallurgy. Compared to metal contact of silicon, the status of GaAs metallization is still at its primitive stage. With the advent of GaAs MESFET and integrated circuits, very stringent requirements were placed on their metal contacts. During the past few years, extensive researches have been conducted in the area of Au-Ge-Ni in order to lower contact resistances and improve uniformity. In this paper, we report the results of TEM study of interfacial reactions between Ni and GaAs as part of the attempt to understand the role of nickel in Au-Ge-Ni contact of GaAs.N-type, Si-doped, (001) oriented GaAs wafers, 15 mil in thickness, were grown by gradient-freeze method. Nickel thin films, 300Å in thickness, were e-gun deposited on GaAs wafers. The samples were then annealed in dry N2 in a 3-zone diffusion furnace at temperatures 200°C - 600°C for 5-180 minutes. Thin foils for TEM examinations were prepared by chemical polishing from the GaA.s side. TEM investigations were performed with JE0L- 100B and JE0L-200CX electron microscopes.


Author(s):  
Frank J. Longo

Measurement of the egg's electrical activity, the fertilization potential or the activation current (in voltage clamped eggs), provides a means of detecting the earliest perceivable response of the egg to the fertilizing sperm. By using the electrical physiological record as a “real time” indicator of the instant of electrical continuity between the gametes, eggs can be inseminated with sperm at lower, more physiological densities, thereby assuring that only one sperm interacts with the egg. Integrating techniques of intracellular electrophysiological recording, video-imaging, and electron microscopy, we are able to identify the fertilizing sperm precisely and correlate the status of gamete organelles with the first indication (fertilization potential/activation current) of the egg's response to the attached sperm. Hence, this integrated system provides improved temporal and spatial resolution of morphological changes at the site of gamete interaction, under a variety of experimental conditions. Using these integrated techniques, we have investigated when sperm-egg plasma membrane fusion occurs in sea urchins with respect to the onset of the egg's change in electrical activity.


2000 ◽  
Vol 64 (11) ◽  
pp. 772-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
JG Odom ◽  
PL Beemsterboer ◽  
TD Pate ◽  
NK Haden

2002 ◽  
Vol 110 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
W Freedman
Keyword(s):  

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