Valence and arousal in WHAT and HOW exclamatives: cognitive simplification versus emotive implication

This paper focuses on the cognitive and semantic difference between HOW and WHAT exclamatives in a literary corpus (two collections of short stories written by Katherine Mansfield and published in 1923, Bliss: and Other Stories and The Garden Party: and Other Stories). A bi-dimensional model of emotion is used (T. Colibazzi et al. [2010], J. Posner et al. [2009]), with valence and arousal being systematically studied, among other cognitive, narrative, semantic and syntactic criteria, to analyse 249 occurrences. WHAT exclamatives mainly serve social purposes and express external perception-based processes and typically have marked valence and low arousal, while HOW exclamatives typically signal strong arousal and neutral valence. The “symbolic” (R. Langacker [2009:1]) meaning of specific parts of speech plays a role in such a semantic distribution: nouns in WHAT exclamative phrases reveal a need to categorize and evaluate, two cognitive operations resulting in an overall simplification of the complexity of the world. HOW exclamatives, on the contrary, display the speaker’s effort to identify and qualify, via the adjectival head, a complex and emotionally charged quale (felt as subjectively unique).