Natural languages provide a wide range of devices for conveying generalized heightened emotion, henceforth exclamativity. Canonical exclamatives (e.g., English 'What big eyes you have!') are the best- studied vehicles for exclamativity, but there are many others: intonational tunes, particles, emotive intensifying modifiers. The talk uses evidence from large corpora, in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese, to inform existing theoretical treatments with novel quantitative evidence. I seek to characterize the pragmatics of exclamatives in terms of hearer and speaker expectations.

Related papers:

Noah Constant, Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Florian Schwarz. 2008. The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora. To appear in Sprache und Datenverarbeitung.

Christopher Potts and Florian Schwarz. Exclamatives and heightened emotion: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora. Ms., UMass Amherst. 2008.

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