This paper puts forward the hypothesis that wh-exclamatives in Present-day English are much more
genre-specific than has previously been acknowledged. To test this, prototypical how- and
what-exclamatives are searched for in three different corpora containing material from conceptually oral
language, that is prose fiction, personal letters and informal, spontaneous face-to-face conversations. The results show that in
terms of token frequency, wh-exclamatives are most frequent in personal letters, a genre which has hitherto not
been linked with exclamatives. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate that each genre shows a different distribution of
exclamatives. In all cases, the different structural realizations (clausal vs. non-clausal form) can be connected to the function
the exclamative fulfills in the respective genre and to the general properties of the three distinct text types. The results
compel us to consider that exclamatives might be more specialized than has been believed so far.
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