Research On Modern Japanese Exclamation

The most common sentence types in Japanese are declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentences. The study on exclamatory sentences is less than that of the other three types. Up to now, there is no detailed study on facets of exclamatory sentences, including its nature, its forms and its emotional contents. Therefore, the study on exclamatory sentences is meaningful in terms of its position in grammatical study and its important function in our life. Exclamatory sentence in a broad sense is focused on the thesis. The research objectives of the thesis:1. Firstly it studies exclamatory sentence in a broad sense, including its natures, basic elements, forms and sentimental contents.2. Secondly it inquires into the features of exclamatory sentences.The term of category, originally developed in cognition linguistics, is introduced into the thesis. Modern category theory holds that any category is developed from its archetype. Extra-category members and intra-category ones are similar in origin.After having studied over 80 typical sentences, the author concludes as follows:1. According to expressing intentions and sentence forms, the researcher studies the classificatory criterion of exclamatory sentences and divides them into typical, quasi-typical and non-typical ones.2. One-word interjection is archetype of exclamatory sentence (see p58. Chart One). The researcher studies the extended and similar relationship between category numbers; Exclamatory sentences are sentences expressing speakers' intense, various feeling towards an entity; Basic elements of exclamatory sentences include intense emotion, reason and object; Finally exclamatory sentence has the following nine features:(1) In terms of sentence nature, exclamatory sentences are of four types, including exclamatory sentence in a narrow sense-expressing exclamation specially; declarative, interrogative and imperative exclamatory sentences.(2) In terms of sentence unit, there are one-word exclamatory sentence, phrasal one, simple one and compound one.(3) In terms of syntax feature, only exclamatory sentence in a narrow sense has its syntax feature while exclamatory sentence in a broad sense does not.(4) Only exclamatory in a narrow sense has fixed sentence pattern.(5) In modern Japanese, exclamatory mark seldom appears in exclamatory sentence in a narrow sense while it do appear in exclamatory sentence in a broad sense.(6) Exclamatory sentence expresses speakers' emotion towards all matters in all times.(7) The meaning of the sentence changes from the usual to the unusual.(8) One exclamatory sentence can express more than one emotion.(9) Emotion expressed in exclamatory sentence changes with the mood.3. In terms of emotion, exclamatory sentence has two types, including that of expressing shock and that of expressing feelings other than shock. The author summarizes 7 kinds of the former and 37 types of the latter.The thesis provides an insight into the nature, elements and features of exclamatory sentences by outlining the internal scope of exclamatory sentences. It attempts to better Japanese grammatical system and fills the gaps in study of exclamatory sentences.