TY - JOUR AU - Reisinger, Daniel K. E. AU - Huijsmans, Marianne PY - 2020/09/18 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - ?aqa?: A generalized exclamation operator in ?ay?a?u??m JF - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung JA - SuB VL - 24 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/sub/2020.v24i2.892 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/892 SP - 183-200 AB - <div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p>In this paper, we present a formal analysis of the common and yet not well- understood auxiliary <em>?aqa?</em> in ?ay?a?u??m (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon; Central Salish). Based on original fieldwork, we argue that speakers can use <em>?aqa?</em> not only to express wishes or worries, but also to signal the unexpectedness or predictableness of the denoted proposition. To account for this initially perplexing banquet of meanings, we propose — in the spirit of Grosz (2011, 2014) — that <em>?aqa?</em> functions as an exclamation operator (EX) that serves to express the speaker’s emotion towards the status of a proposition on a contextually salient scale. As predicted by this approach, the use of <em>?aqa?</em> can give rise to optatives, adversatives, polar exclamatives, and congruent exclamatives — a novel type of exclamative we discover in the process. A claim that emerges from the analysis is that Grosz’s EX operator, which is covert in German and English, may be realized overtly in other languages.</p></div></div></div></div> ER -