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In:Surprise at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Linguistics
Edited by Natalie Depraz and Agnès Celle
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series 11] 2019
► pp. 59–76

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Chapter 4
Encoding surprise in English novels

An enunciative approach

 | Université de Rouen Normandie
Published online: 6 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ceb.11.04fil
Abstract
After studying surprise words of variable intensity, I presently turn to “mirative” clause constructions conveying surprise in the same type of literary corpus data in English, providing an enunciative treatment of characters as experiencers, not agents at first. Culioli’s T(P)EO defines surprise as the deconstruction of expectation in that the outcome of a situation is other than expected, valued positively or negatively according to the subjects’ norms. The linguistic encoding of surprise relates to prior subjective representations which the characters’ referents have to abandon when confronted with something new: unusual, unknown, or unthinkable. The communicative situation thus requires them to manage a certain otherness, necessitating some kind of agentive response in terms of adjustment to a new state of affairs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An enunciative approach to the encoding of surprise in English
  • 3.Presentation of the written literary corpus data based on English novels: A qualitative study of surprise (lexemes and) syntactic constructions
  • 4.Some grammatical means of conveying surprise
    • 4.1Echo exclamatives
    • 4.2Echo interrogatives
    • 4.3Imperatives
    • 4.4Declaratives introduced by “I thought”
  • 5.Adjusting to the new state of affairs: From loss of control to control regained
    • 5.1Regaining control through more descriptive-like patterns of markers
    • 5.2Adjustment in post-surprise contexts
    • 5.3The circular dynamic of surprise
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Corpus data
References (41)
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Corpus data
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Filippi-Deswelle, Catherine
2021. L’étonnement linguistique chez Antoine Culioli, « linguiste philosophe ». Anglophonia 31 DOI logo

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