Exclamatory utterances: evidence and inference

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze and explain the enunciative functioning of exclamatory utterances that encode an evidential value. For this, an explanatory proposal is considered as a starting point: the evidential process in question is typically an abductive inference. To test this proposal, contextualized examples of exclamatory utterances extracted from the first chapter of Os Maias are analyzed. The analysis demonstrates that the inferential process underlying the exclamatory utterances considered is not abductive, but rather deductive. It is also argued that, in the examples considered, the relation of negation between an expected situation and a verified situation, which characterizes any evidential exclamatory utterance, even if deductive inferential, can correspond to different types of deduction.