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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Different Languages - Different Sentence Types? On Exclamative Sentences

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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.