Exclamatives and heightened emotion: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora

Exclamatives like What a dump!, Wow!, and Boy, you’ve grown! are, when uttered in context, rich in information about the speaker’s attitudes. Drawing on evidence from about 100, 000 online product reviews with associated meta-data, we develop a frequency-based characterization of this pragmatic contribution. This allows us to make precise predictions about the exclamativity that inheres in these constructions. In addition, we build logistic regression models and use the resulting statistics to state general, corpusand language-independent hypotheses about what it means to be an exclamative pragmatically. These hypotheses allow us to identify previously unnoticed exclamatives, and they highlight the importance of purely expressive meanings.