In Intonations^x, Exclamation marks^x

It just means that when question or exclamation marks are used, they occur in pairs. It kind of makes sense when you're reading a sentence to know up front whether it will have one of these two exclamation marks at the end, so you gauge your intonation accordingly.

Hanuman_2000 wrote: 4. "You have to read Swan's Practical English Usage!"4a. "You must read Swan's Practical English Usage!" — here, both sentences mean the same thing: "if you want a wildly enjoyable or instructive experience, read Swan." You have explained the meaning of (2) and (3). But...

The reason is that many Spanish questions can have the same form as a statement and inversion of subject and verb is quite common in statements. Also subject pronouns are not usually expressed. In speech the difference between questions and statements is apparent from intonation. In writing the...

I believe 'You have mail!' was the phrase in question. AOL maintained it was too similar to their own 'You've got mail!'. (This would seem to be contrary to the 'emphasis' argument, by the way.) I'd be more inclined to say that the emphasis in both phrases resides in the exclamation mark (or the...

From "A Grammar of Contemporary English", by R. Quirk et al. Both question and exclamation mark exclude the use of other separation punctuation and have the value of a period inasmuch as what follows begins with the capitalisation of a new sentence. But when they co-ocur with the end of...