From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Wed Sep 07 2005 - 12:15:34 CDT
On Wednesday 07 September 2005 19:40, John Hudson wrote:
>
> There is a reason why you so seldom see ?! or !? in books, excepting
> some juvenile novels: most authors and copy editors know the
> difference between a question and an exclamation and they decide
> which is appropriate. They do not leave the status of an utterance
> ambiguous. I have about a thousand books sitting around me, and I'd
> be hard pressed to find ?! in any of them.
Just FYI: I have an impression that ?! and !? are relatively often
used in Russian. At least I could easily find several examples in
any work of classical Russian literature where I tried to look for
them. There is nothing strange in this fact, because the normative
Russian grammar (as I learned it in school) distinguishes 3 types of
sentences by type of statement (declarative, imperative, interrogative)
and 2 types by intonation (exclamative or non exclamative). So
the same sentence may be both interrogative and exclamative without
any contradiction.
In fact, I don't think this classification is specific for Russian,
because it is found in some manuals of English language as well.
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
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