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CHAPTER 5 EKAN/EKEN AND THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIVITY The same morphemes, ekan/eken, that express non-firsthand information source via the
expression of non-confirmativity have a second purpose. This purpose is to express
EMOTIVITY
in the form of admiratives and rhetorical questions. Morphemes that express evidential meaning
are known to express
ADMIRATIVITY
, or the expression of unexpected information, but it is
comparatively rare for these same morphemes to also play a role in the creation of rhetorical
questions. Because ekan/eken can express both, I propose to unite these two functions as means
of expressing emotivity, as ekan/eken may indicate that the utterance they are attached to is an
instance of the use of language in its emotive function. When ekan/eken are employed to
indicate this emotive function of language, they are glossed as
EMOT
(emotive).
Although
EMOTIVITY
is generally agreed upon as a major function of language, the
discussion of this function is not often expanded beyond the realm of obvious emotive
morphemes like interjections or exclamations. For this reason I open with a discussion of the
emotive function of language and the relationship between the functions of language, speech
acts, and sentence types. The second section of this chapter addresses the use of ekan/eken to
express
ADMIRATIVITY
, which I propose is, in Uzbek and Kazakh, an expression of emotivity
within declarative sentences. R
HETORICAL QUESTIONS
are discussed in the next section, and I
likewise propose that these arise from the expression of emotivity in interrogative sentences.
The final section connects the various meanings expressed by ekan/eken: non-confirmativity,
non-firsthand information source, and admirativity/emotivity. I propose in this final section that
the incompatability of non-confirmativity, a subjective type of
STATUS
or
MODALITY
, with
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interrogativity results in the surfacing of the secondary meanings expressed by ekan/eken:
evidentiality and emotivity.