Katharina Turgay

Linguistinnen und Linguisten im In- und Ausland sind mit ganz unterschiedlichen Ansätzen und Zielen in die Diskussion darüber eingetreten, wie sprachkritische Reflexionen in die Sprachwissenscha [...]

This article discusses a relatively new construction, called „expressive subordinate-clause construction“ (ENK), which is highly frequent in social media and consists of a DP anchor and an attributive clause like „The moment when you realize it’s a Monday tomorrow“. Besides sketching some of the particular syntactic properties of this expression, this paper examines the relation of the ENK to the conversational practice of narration (in the everyday sense). The ENK expresses some specific emotion, as triggered by the situation expressed by the subordinate clause, and thereby is tied to the experiences of the speaker to which the hearer is supposed to relate. The ENK hence instantiates the property of experiencialty (one of the crucial aspects of narrations) in a rather direct way. This will be connected to the observation that the ENK is expressive: it expresses its content in a non-truth-conditional way. As this gives an immediate impression of the speaker’s emotions, a close connection between expressivity and experiencialty can be drawn. Together with other features of narration, like genericity or tellability, the ENK thereby collects many of the important characteristics of narration in a very short form, which is why call it a minimal narration.

Whereas the use of most punctuation marks is thought to be governed by grammatical rules, some punctuation marks can be used in a more expressive way that rather reflects emotions and/or attitudes of the writer instead of grammatical properties. In this paper, we will discuss the distinction between grammatical and expressive punctuation and suggest that pragmatic punctuation marks exhibit certain features that the more grammatical punctuation marks do not: They are expressive, they can occur rather freely inside a sentence, they can be repeated to intensify their effect, and they can be combined with other expressive punctuation. A comparison of commas and exclamation points illustrates the difference between grammatical and pragmatic punctuation marks. We will investigate the most common punctuation marks with respect to these properties and assign them a place in what may be called the grammar-pragmatics continuum of punctuation. We will conclude with a comparison between expressive punctuation and emojis which can be used to fulfill similar roles and present a case study of the combination „!?!“.

Linguistische Modelle dienen der Beschreibung sprachlicher Phänomene und Gewinnung weiterer wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse, können für die Didaktik nutzbar gemacht werden und im Sprachunterricht Anwendung finden. Die Beiträge des Sonderhef [...]