Emphatic Expressions

Another couple of emphatic expressions, i.e. other ways of giving emotions emphasis are expressions with the words ‘so’ and ‘such’.

Let’s start with some examples:

"She’s sùch a nice gírl!"
"I’m ¦so afraid they’ll get lòst."
"Why is he ¦such a bàby!"
"Don’t upsèt yourself ¦so!"

These have an emotive emphasis similar to that of exclamations, but their tone is rather ‘gushy’ (meaning very emotional or enthusiastic).

The words ‘so’ and ‘such’ are stressed, and for extra emphasis, they may also receive nuclear stress. We've looked into the concept of 'nucleus' in the grammar lesson of our E-zine Issue 037)

‘Such’, like ‘what’ acts as a predeterminer, meaning that they are placed in front of a determiner. If you remember, determiners are words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘my’, ‘your’, ‘some’, etc. If you don’t remember this, don’t worry, we need to have a lesson on this matter in the near future.

‘Such’ and ‘what’ both appear before the definite article with singular count nouns, and without an article with plural count nouns and mass nouns.

See the examples below:

“What a nuisance!” ~ “It was such a nuisance!”
“What beautiful children you have!” ~ “She has such beautiful children!”
“What awful weather!” ~ “We had such awful weather.”