2004
Volume 30, Issue 1/2
  • ISSN: 1384-5845
  • E-ISSN: 2352-1171

Abstract

Abstract

English, Dutch, and German make use of an expressive -construction that has a commentary function, evaluates an event negatively, and is rooted in intensifying constructions such as . An English example is , which expresses incomprehension (like intensified open -questions) and conveys negative emotions, but also contains a comment by simultaneously answering the question: the above example can be paraphrased as “What is going on here? This reminds me of the contents of the film ,” whereby the event commented on is negatively evaluated by linking it with another object. This contribution investigates how intensified -questions such as are related to such examples of intensified comments (i.e., intensified -questions with a commentary function), and how the latter are rooted in the former. It furthermore compares the use of intensified comments in English, Dutch and German. It is demonstrated that intensified comments build on the conventionalised pragmatic functions of intensified -questions in all three languages, although the concrete -templates differ ( X for English and Dutch, X for German). The intensified -template that is being used depends on its status in the language: it is in every case the most versatile template that allows for most variation. Data from the social media platform X shows that intensified comments are frequent in English and infrequent in German, yielding a situation in which Dutch (which borrows its intensified-comment template from English) takes the middle road. Moreover, English and Dutch intensified comments are more versatile with regard to their syntactic buildup: non-NP constructions such as and gender-mismatched constructions such as are unproblematic, while German intensified comments only occur with nouns and year numbers (e.g., , ).

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