Languages & Linguistics
Interjections
Interjections are words or phrases used to express strong emotions or feelings in a spontaneous manner. They often stand alone or are inserted into sentences to convey surprise, joy, pain, or other sentiments. In linguistics, interjections are considered a distinct part of speech and are not grammatically connected to the rest of the sentence.
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10 Key excerpts on "Interjections"
eBook - PDF- Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Wilkins’ (1992) formal definition of Interjections, which is based on syntactic and morphological criteria, shall serve as starting point, followed by a brief summary of a number of phonological, semantic and pragmatic properties of Interjections. The hedges in Wilkins’ definition take account of the fact that it only fully applies to core members of the word class. Interjection : A conventional lexical form which (commonly and) conventionally con-stitutes an utterance on its own, (typically) does not enter into construction with other word classes, is (usually) monomorphemic, and (generally) does not host inflectional or derivational morphemes. (Wilkins 1992: 124) The fact that Interjections are utterances by themselves is said to be reflected by the fact that they are separated by a pause from other utterances with which they may co-occur (cf. Ameka 1992a: 108). Furthermore, core members of the word class are typically short and often phonologically anomalous (cf. Ameka 1992: 105–106). Semantically, Interjections are holophrastic, i.e. they express the mean-ing of a whole sentence in one word. There have been attempts to paraphrase the meaning of Interjections using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (cf., for example, the articles in the Journal of Pragmatics 18.2/3; Wierzbicka 1986, 1991: chapter 8). Wilkins has observed that all Interjections contain a deictic element, as their complete interpretation depends on the actual speech moment (cf. Wilkins 1992: 132). A social deictic element is most prominent in expletives, whose use strongly depends on the social setting and the intended audience (cf. Wilkins 1992: 149; Evans 1992: 236). Interjections are typically uttered as spontaneous, emo-tional reactions to a situation or to a sudden realisation after internal reflection.
eBook - PDFCross-Cultural Pragmatics
The Semantics of Human Interaction
- Anna Wierzbicka, Werner Winter(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
290 Interjections across cultures 1.2. Defining the concept of 'interjection' An interjection can be defined as a linguistic sign (1) which can be used on its own, (2) which expresses a specifiable meaning, (3) which does not include other signs (with a specifiable meaning), (4) which is not homophonous with another lexical item that would be perceived as semantically related to it, and (5) which refers to the speaker's current mental state or mental act (for example I feel ... , I want ... , I think I know ... ) . By these criteria, exclamations such as Good Lord.!, Good heavens!, Christ! or Hell! are not Interjections, whereas those like gee, wow, oops or ha are. (Cf. Goffman's 1981:99 definition of what he calls response cries: exclamatory Interjections which are not full-fledged words.) One class of signs for which the definition proposed above is some-what problematic includes onomotopoeic signs such as hyc (jump) or bgc (fall) in Polish, which are meant to depict an action in a semi-iconic way and which are used as substitutes for predicates, for example: Kot hyc! - z okna na ziemig. (Grodzienska 1970:16) 'The cat hyc (i.e. jumped) - from the window onto the floor.' Jak to sionko ujrzalo, Tak si{! glosno zasmialo, Tak si$ wzigio pod boki, Az b$c! - z chmury wysokiej. 'When the sun saw that, It burst out laughing, And was so delighted, It [fell] — crunch! — from its place in the clouds.' Iconic 'depictives' such as hyc or b$c are somewhat problematic be-cause in a sense they can occur as constituents of larger constructions and because they are often homophonous with global signs to which they are semantically related. For example, the Polish word hop can be used either as a depictive representing a jump (and stressing, unlike hyc, its vertical aspect), or as a global utterance urging the addressee to jump.
eBook - PDFCorpus Pragmatics
A Handbook
- Karin Aijmer, Christoph Rühlemann(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
In particular, Interjections are often grouped with exclamatives as items which signal both surprise and either positive or negative emotional involvement. Wierzbicka (1992) and Wilkins (1992) propose definitions for various Interjections using a semantic metalanguage, but such semantic analysis of Interjections also seems to miss the pragmatic point. For pragmatic units such as Interjections we require a description of functions in context. For a grab-bag category like Interjections we need to recognize sub-groups on functional grounds rather than to attempt an analysis which glosses over pragmatic distinctions. Treating Interjections in terms of meanings or emotions expressed also tends to lose track of their nuts-and-bolts functionality in filling pauses, introducing turns, connecting utterances, signaling attention, and so on. Seen in their functional roles in everyday talk, Interjections are not really independent of other constructions, as is so often maintained, especially when they act as discourse markers integrated into a single intonation unit with another word or clause, as in: hell yes; shit no damn is that hot; boy are they ever oh come on; well I just don’t know so they’re gone, huh; not bad, eh? Interjections are at least bound into discourse grammar, and certainly into the turn-taking system of talk-in-interaction, if not into the sentential grammar of written language. Now, with sufficient corpus data to back up our descriptions, Interjections 253 we can show how Interjections of various types fulfill a range of functions, particularly in everyday talk. 9.2.2 Sub-classification Perhaps the most fundamental classification of Interjections is into primary versus secondary Interjections. According to Ameka (1992), Interjections divide into primary Interjections like oh and uh, and secondary Interjections like boy and damn.
eBook - PDF- M. Ljung(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
76 Swearing These results confirm the correctness of my hypothesis that practically any utterance may be an exclamation. What matters is obviously not the syntactic or other nature of the utterances, but merely the manner in which they are delivered, which should be one reflecting the speak- er’s state of mind. Their meaning can only be explained in terms of the communicative situation in which they are uttered: they are, as Quirk et al. (1985: section 2.58) put it, ‘pragmatic utterances with speaker- directed communicative functions’. Clearly such a definition of the utterances in Table 4.1 is neither satis- factory nor sufficient. It fails to observe certain common characteristics of these utterances, for instance that in addition to being emotive, most of them consist of a single taboo word and that those containing more than one word do not make up full clauses with the expected syntactic structure. A more promising category in which to place the utterances in Table 4.1 is that of Interjections, a type of words whose members are often described as being ‘emotive’ and not entering into syntactic rela- tions (Quirk et al. 1985: 11.55). The definitions of Interjections have varied over the years, but they all have certain key features in common. They are often regarded as a word class or part of speech, for instance in Quirk et al. (1985) where they are listed among the word classes in section 2.34, albeit as a ‘marginal and anomalous class’, of which certain members are later on (section 2.58 Note) referred to as ‘quasi-linguistic noises’. Interestingly enough, how- ever, and despite the alleged word-class status of the Interjections, Quirk et al. acknowledge in the same note that ‘statements and questions, too, can occur as Interjections’.
eBook - ePub- Gesine Lenore Schiewer, Jeanette Altarriba, Bee Chin Ng, Gesine Lenore Schiewer, Jeanette Altarriba, Bee Chin Ng(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2009 ), that is, a perceivable signal in the speech modality (a sequence of sounds) or in a written transcription (a sequence of graphemes) which is linked in a stable way, in the long-term memory of the speakers of a language, to the meaning of a whole speech act. In brief, it is a signal conveying, in a culturally codified manner, information including both a performative and a propositional content. Not only the propositional content, but also the specific performative is then “incorporated” in the interjection, that is, it makes an integral part of the interjection’s meaning. This definition allows us to distinguish an interjection both from elliptical sentences and from affect bursts.3.1 Interjections versus elliptical sentences
Often, in everyday communication we use a single word – one belonging to the other grammatical categories: a noun, a verb, an adverb – in the place of an entire sentence. For instance, I can use the noun beer both in response to a bartender asking me,(1)and in response to a tourist asking me:What are you having tonight?(2)What did this old factory produce?In these cases, the very same noun beer means, respectively:(3)as an answer to (1), or elsePour me some beer.(4)as an answer to (2). The same noun stands for two utterly different speech acts: a performative of request and one of information concerning totally different contents.This old factory once produced beer.An interjection, instead, always has the same meaning in whatever context, because the link of that sound sequence is codified as corresponding to that meaning in a stable way, just like any vocal lexical item.3.2 The deictic nature of Interjections
Defining the interjection as a holophrastic signal entails that, as pointed out by Ameka (1992a) and Wilkins (1992), whether we call it a word or a sentence, the interjection is a deictic signal, i.e., one which, to be thoroughly understood, requires one to take contextual information into account. In fact, while in the meaning of an interjection both the performative and the propositional content are steadily codified, a piece of information remains to be completed and must be retrieved from context. Hey! means “I (the Speaker) ask you (the Interlocutor) to pay attention to something”, but to understand who is asked to pay attention, and what s/he should pay attention to, one has to be present in the same spatio-temporal context in which the interjection is uttered. Wow! means “I (the Speaker) inform you that I am pleasantly surprised/amazed”, but to understand each particular occurrence of Wow! one should know what the specific surprising event is: for instance, what is the previously uttered sentence to which this is a response. In other words, every interjection somehow calls into consideration a contextual piece of information that we may call its “reference element”; and to retrieve this, one must take the physical or verbal context into account. For example, with Interjections conveying a mental state of the Speaker (like wow!), the reference element is the event that causes that mental state, while with those requesting some action (Hey!
eBook - PDF- Gisle Andersen, Karin Aijmer, Gisle Andersen, Karin Aijmer(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
I show how Interjections function as pragmatic markers of various types, in particular parallel markers, that is as words or phrases separate and distinct from the propositional content of the surrounding utterance and signaling a message in addition to the basic utterance message, namely the speaker’s emotional involvement with the foregoing turn or the interaction as a whole. After a brief treatment of Interjections as intensifiers in phrases like hell no , which initially seem like parallel markers, but are not, I go on to describe functions of Interjections which go beyond those of parallel pragmatic markers. In the next two sections, I treat combinations of Interjections and the phrase I tell you as illustrative of the class of idiomatic phrasal Interjections. The traditional relation of Interjections with exclamative clauses is taken up in the fol-lowing section. In the penultimate section, I show that Interjections must be treated as constituting an open class of items. A final conclusion pulls together the main points of this essay. 2. State of the art Although Interjections are often characterized as the neglected part of speech, there is actually a fair amount of literature on them (see Ameka 1992; and Nübl-ing 2004 for overviews of research on Interjections). There is also fairly general agreement about basic formal and functional characteristics. The disagreement and confusion are due primarily to unsubstantiated claims based on intuitions without real evidence and a failure to recognize the differences between spoken and written discourse. Now that we have reliable, large corpora of spoken lan-guage, the problem of evidence versus intuitions seems to be taking care of itself. We finally need no longer guess about distributions and frequencies of linguistic items.
eBook - PDF- Kofi Yakpo(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
Many Interjections are “primary” (Ameka 1992b) and consti-tute a micro word class of mostly monosyllabic “small words” which do not occur in contexts other than those described here. Some primary Interjections are also phonolog-ically deviant. For example, Interjections constitute the only word class in which vowel length may be distinctive (i.e. a ‘1sg.sbj’ v s. aa ‘expression of insight’). Other interjec-tions are “secondary” and also employed as members of other word classes, and they may enter into grammatical constructions with other constituents. In the following, I cover the most commonly used Interjections. Some Interjections are cross-classifed and may there fore be members of more than one of the three functional types (e.g. mamá ‘mother’ which is employed as an expressive and a phatic interjection). 12.2.1 Expressive Expressive Interjections refect the emotional and cognitive state o f the speaker, but they also serve a communicative purpose by drawing the a ten tion of potential listeners to the mental state of the u terer. Consider the expressive Interjections in Table 12.2. Table 12.2 Expressive Interjections Interjection Gloss Function Primary cháy/chɛ́ ‘intj’ Exaspera tion áy ‘intj’ Ex treme sensation ékié ‘intj’ Cou nterexpectation ‘chíp’ ‘suck teeth’ Irritation, fatigue Secondary papá gɔ́d ‘father God’ Exasperation, self-pity nawá (ó) ‘oh my’ Exasperation, (self-)pity mamá ‘mother’ Surprise, shock chico ‘boy’ Surprise, admiration dios (mío) ‘my God’ Surprise, irritation señor (mío) ‘my Lord’ Surprise, irritation bió bió ‘behold’ Pleasant surprise mierda ‘shit’ Annoyance, anger An exemplary primary interjection with an expressive meaning is chɛ́ or cháy , which conveys the feeling of exasperation in the face of a di fcult task. In (21), chɛ́ is the reaction of speaker(dj) to a particularly ungrammatical sentence that I (ko) submit to him for a grammaticality judgement: 449
- Marcin Walczynski, Piotr Czajka, Michal Szawerna(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
On the other hand, the sounds of actions and their results ‒ another group of proto- typical Interjections ‒ do feature informal expressions. However, other func- tional themes are more highly represented. The sounds related to emotions, sociocultural codes, and rhetorical devices feature informal Interjections very prominently, which reflects the slang and informal usages. Interestingly, such functional distribution is found both in English and Polish, and probably works for other languages as well, which would suggest that it is universal. Also, as sig- naled by numerous examples in this paper, the use of colloquial Interjections is increasingly common, especially in the speech of the younger generation, and one can hypothesize that it is likely to become even more pervasive in the future. However, more studies are needed to shed more light on this interesting lexical phenomenon. References Biber D. et al. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Chapman R. L. (1986) The New Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Harper and Row. Crystal D. (1991) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Dunn M., Aragonés S. (2005) Zounds! A Browser’s Dictionary of Interjections. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Eble C. (1996) Slang and Sociability. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Garcarz M. (2013) Afro-American Hip Hop Slang: A Sociolinguistic Study of Street Speech. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Atut. Gehweiler E. (2010) “Interjections and expletives”. [In:] Juncker A., Taavitsainen I. (eds.) Historical Pragmatics. Vol. 8. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton; 315–349. Gramley S., Pätzold K-M. (2004) A Survey of Modern English. New York: Routledge. Colloquial Interjections in English and Polish 51 Kowalczyk M. (2010) “Slavic-Yiddish borrowings in American slang”. Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 57; 13–24. Kowalczyk M. (2014) Bazinga! A Dictionary of Colloquial English Interjections.
eBook - PDF- Alan Reed Libert(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
Introduction and General Discussion 46 Turner (1840:83) says the following: Of pure Interjections but few are admitted into books. As words or sounds of this kind serve rather to indicate feeling than to express thought, they seldom have any definable signification. […] Some significant words properly belonging to other classes, are ranked with Interjections, when uttered with emotion and in an unconnected manner. Connon (1845:34–5) uses both the terms pure Interjections and Interjections proper: Pure Interjections are mere instinctive emissions of the voice, few in number and unimportant in character; and as to other parts of speech used interjectively, the expression is, we apprehend, elliptical; but this circumstance cannot properly change the nature and character of a word. (p. 34) The Interjections proper are such as these: Ah! aha! alas! … lo! &c. The words adieu, strange, welcome, and many others liable to be used like Interjections, properly belong to other parts of speech. (p. 35) Whitney (1886:347) states, “The simple or pure Interjections in French are in part the same as in English”. He does not say what he means by “simple or pure Interjections”, but one might think that he means (some- thing like) primary Interjections, since his (ibid.) examples of them include ah ‘ah’ and ô, oh ‘oh’, and since then he (ibid.) says “Many words and brief phrases are used elliptically in the manner of Interjections”. 13 He also (ibid.) states, “The interrogative pronouns and adverbs are often employed in an interjetional or exclamatory way”.
eBook - PDF- Lluís Payrató, Josep Maria Cots(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The metalinguistic be ´ (162) indicates that the excursus is finished and she can finally get to the point (‘‘La meva cunyada ens va dir que la menta era molt dolenta perque ` feia pujar la pressio ´ ’’ ‘My sister-in-law told us that mint was very bad cause it made blood pressure go up’). Then Jordi indicates understanding and agreement ( ah , 168) but adds a restriction (‘‘a lo millor la tinc baixa’’, ‘maybe it [his blood pres-sure] is low’’), to which IDA also expresses understanding ( ah , 171) and agreement ( be ´ , 172). 204 Maria-Josep Cuenca This excerpt highlights the frequency and role of di¤erent types of Interjections in conversation. The propositional content of the excerpt is reduced if compared with the interactional values introduced by the markers described. The progress of conversation is based on a negotiation of meanings for which Interjections are key-elements. 6. Concluding remarks Interjections are frequent elements in informal conversation where they encode subjective and intersubjective meanings crucial for conversation progress and management. Catalan Interjections have proved to be a rich and varied class of lexical items. Formally, they range from simple vocal sounds, sometimes close to non-verbal devices, to complex structures that have lost their original morphosyntactic properties, have become fixed and equivalent to a whole utterance and have developed a pragmatic meaning. They have been classified into expressive, conative, phatic, metalinguistic and representative considering the pragmatic function that they encode. Finally, language contact and interference explains the fact that forms and uses of Spanish and English make their way in Catalan informal conversation. References Almela Pe ´rez, Ramo ´n 1985 Apuntes gramaticales sobre la interjeccio ´n. Madrid: Secretariado de Publicaciones, Universidad de Murcia. Ameka, Felix 1992 Interjections: The universal yet neglected part of speech.
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