Exclamatives in Scandinavian*

Abstract

In this article, I define exclamatives pragmatically, as a speech act which contains an assertion, and where there is a mismatch between this assertion and a presupposition. The assertion normally expresses a higher degree than expected, i.e. they are scalar. The speech act is instantiated in various ways in the Scandinavian languages. The aim of this article is to describe and characterise the syntactic variation in Scandinavian exclamative clauses, in the standard languages, as well as in some regional variants. First, I discuss the definition of exclamatives, and I recognise three main types, which I call degree, polar and reinforcing exclamatives. Second, I give a survey of the syntactic variation of the three types in Scandinavian, where I discuss syntactic properties such as word order and extraction possibilities as well as lexical, syntactic and prosodic features that are exclusive to exclamatives. Last, I conclude the paper by a taxonomy of exclamatives in Scandinavian.

The polyfunctionality of which in Övdalian

“…e isomorphy represented by Övdalian ukað introducing both main and embedded yes/no-questions is by no means unique across languages, in fact, not even across varieties of North Germanic. Such isomorphy is well-known from the Rogaland dialects of Norwegian for the item om (see Enger 1995;Vangsnes 1996;Rognes 2011: 121 ), and it is also found in Finland-Swedish dialects (Östman 1986). 11 In these dialects we thus nd both (21a) and (21b).…”

“…Furthermore, if the adnominal exclamative use relates to the querying use, we could argue that contiguity is broken in the case of Standard Swedish vilken: in questions, this item can only be used to query for (see Vangsnes 2008c), but as discussed in Delsing (2010) it can also be used in exclamatives of the type in (43b) and (44b).…”

On the syntax of verb‐initial exclamatives*

“…In Swedish, for example, V1E are acceptable – at least in spoken language. But they are not as productive as in German, since they cannot occur with nominal degree expressions, as reported in Delsing (2007), see (10c).…”

Nanotechnology and Analytical Chemistry

“…The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov 'for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene'. The hammock would weigh less than one milligram, corresponding to the weight of one of the cat's whiskers [19]. Graphene consists of a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.…”