Abstract

This article discusses a relatively new construction, called „expressive subordinate-clause construction“ (ENK), which is highly frequent in social media and consists of a DP anchor and an attributive clause like „The moment when you realize it’s a Monday tomorrow“. Besides sketching some of the particular syntactic properties of this expression, this paper examines the relation of the ENK to the conversational practice of narration (in the everyday sense). The ENK expresses some specific emotion, as triggered by the situation expressed by the subordinate clause, and thereby is tied to the experiences of the speaker to which the hearer is supposed to relate. The ENK hence instantiates the property of experiencialty (one of the crucial aspects of narrations) in a rather direct way. This will be connected to the observation that the ENK is expressive: it expresses its content in a non-truth-conditional way. As this gives an immediate impression of the speaker’s emotions, a close connection between expressivity and experiencialty can be drawn. Together with other features of narration, like genericity or tellability, the ENK thereby collects many of the important characteristics of narration in a very short form, which is why call it a minimal narration.