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.

中文翻译：

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英语 wh 感叹词的体裁细节

本文提出了这样的假设：当今英语中的 wh 感叹词比之前所承认的更加具有特定的体裁特征。为了测试这一点，我们在三个不同的语料库中搜索典型的“如何”和“什么”感叹词，这些语料库包含来自概念性口头语言的材料，即散文小说、私人信件和非正式的、自发的面对面对话。结果表明，就标记频率而言，wh 感叹词在私人信件中最为常见，而迄今为止，这种体裁尚未与感叹词联系起来。此外，结果表明，每种类型都显示出不同的感叹词分布。在所有情况下，不同的结构实现（分句与分句）非分句形式）可以与感叹词在各自体裁中所实现的功能以及三种不同文本类型的一般属性联系起来。结果迫使我们考虑感叹词可能比迄今为止所认为的更加专业。