A Pragmatic Study of Exclamation in English Science Fiction Stories: (Extra-Terrestrial) as a Sample

Abstract

The present research contributes to a pragmatic consideration of exclamation in English science fiction stories. Exclamation has not been sufficiently given due attention in previous studies. However, examining exclamation in English science fiction stories has not been conducted, particularly from a pragmatic perspective. Thus, the current study tries to bridge this gap by pinpointing the strategies of exclamation and their illustration in the selected data under scrutiny. Correspondingly, forty extracts were selected randomly from two English science fiction novels which are examined as specified by an eclectic model. Hence, the current study aims at: (1) Identifying exclamation and its nature pragmatically; (2) Finding out the syntactic and pragmatic strategies for producing exclamatory utterances in English science fiction stories; (3) Conveying the semantic content of exclamatory utterances in English science fiction stories; (4) Investigating the pragmatic intentions and functions beyond applying exclamatory utterances in English science fiction stories; (5) Determining the most dominant strategies of exclamation utilized in English science fiction stories.

       Based on the findings, the current study revealed that: (1) Exclamation can be explained pragmatically in accordance with its relation to the expressive speech acts as it is considered as a subcategory of the expressives, its strong relation with the context, and its capability of indirect (expressive) interpretation used by the speakers for suggesting an intended sense beyond the descriptive sense; (2) exclamation has its own constituent rules (felicity conditions), these rules are sometimes violated by the speaker in order to convey the speaker’s aims and intentions, and (3) there are many functions and intentions that are realized by utilizing exclamatory utterances in science fiction stories, the surprising function is the dominant function.