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Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of Discourse Grammar. It is argued that the structure of exclamatives can be related to other sentence types in terms of discourse strategies that are used for constructing texts, in particular by means of cooptation, a cognitive-communicative strategy that enables speakers to use existing text pieces for new discourse functions.

Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of Discourse Grammar. It is argued that the structure of exclamatives can be related to other sentence types in terms of discourse strategies that are used for constructing texts, in particular by means of cooptation, a cognitive-communicative strategy that enables speakers to use existing text pieces for new discourse functions.

Studies in grammaticalization have established that processes of grammatical change frequently have lexical items as their source, and more specifically nouns and verbs. But there is at least one potential exception: As argued by Holger Diessel in a number of publications, demonstratives cannot be historically derived from other entities, such as lexical items. Based on a survey of languages from different parts of the world and belonging to different language families, the present paper argues that this generalization is in need of reconsideration.

Some recent lines of research suggest that there are two different domains of discourse processing where one is concerned with the form and meaning of sentences and their parts and the other with the organization of discourse beyond the sentence and the relationship between linguistic material and the extra-linguistic situation of discourse. One important mechanism relating the two domains to one another is provided by cooptation, a cognitive-communicative operation whereby pieces of discourse located in one domain are transferred to another domain. In the present paper, the nature of this operation is looked at in more detail based on the framework of Discourse Grammar (Kaltenbock et al. 2011, On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35(4). 848-893; Heine et al. 2013, An outline of Discourse Grammar. In Shannon Bischoff & Carmen Jeny (eds.), Reflections on functionalism in linguistics, 175-233. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton).

Some recent lines of research suggest that there are two different domains of discourse processing where one is concerned with the form and meaning of sentences and their parts and the other with the organization of discourse beyond the sentence and the relationship between linguistic material and the extra-linguistic situation of discourse. One important mechanism relating the two domains to one another is provided by cooptation, a cognitive-communicative operation whereby pieces of discourse located in one domain are transferred to another domain. In the present paper, the nature of this operation is looked at in more detail based on the framework of Discourse Grammar (Kaltenbock et al. 2011, On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35(4). 848-893; Heine et al. 2013, An outline of Discourse Grammar. In Shannon Bischoff & Carmen Jeny (eds.), Reflections on functionalism in linguistics, 175-233. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton).