Interjections: The universal yet neglected part of speech

English Interjections as a Word Class: A Tri-Stratal Description

“…Apart from recognizing continuatives as a special type of interjections based on their discoursal function, we can also classify interjections into what Ameka (1992) calls primary interjections, secondary interjections, and interjectional phrases, with more focus on their syntactic potential-whether an interjection has the potential to enter into syntactic relations with other words. According to Ameka, primary interjections (e.g., ah, ouch, wow, oh, oops) are the words that can only be used as independent utterances and not otherwise, whereas secondary interjections, besides having "an independent semantic value", can also "be used conventionally as utterances by themselves", can also "be used conventionally as utterances by themselves", e.g., Help!, Fire!, Careful!, Damn!, Heavens!, Christ!, Shame!…”

Towards an Alternative Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Interjections

“…c) The distinction between lower-and higher-level explicatures, the latter being speech-act or propositional-attitude descriptions under which the fully propositional form of an utterance, its lower-level explicature, is embedded Wilson 1986, 1995;Wilson and Sperber 1993). With his work, he reacts against what he calls the conceptualist approach to interjections, represented by Wierzbicka (1991Wierzbicka ( , 1992, Ameka (1992aAmeka ( , 1992b or Wilkins (1992Wilkins ( , 1995, as he finds the following problems:…”

“…Their language-or culture-specificity renders them in most cases so idiosyncratic that it is hard for translators to find out exact equivalents in other target languages (Fischer and Drescher 1996;Sierra Soriano 1999;Aijmer 2004). Since they do not have a constant meaning but are multifunctional and their meaning depends on the context where they are produced (Montes 1999;Rosier 2000;Aijmer 2004;Ameka 2006), some authors have given them a marginal place in the linguistic system (Światkowska 2006;Cueto Vallverdú and López Bobo 2003;Ameka 1992aAmeka , 2006Buridant 2006;Kleiber 2006). As a consequence, they have been almost completely forgotten over decades and have not received due attention in linguistics.…”

“…Schiffrin 1987;Montes 1999; but see Blakemore 1987;Fraser 1999Fraser , 2004Wilson and Sperber 1993) or conversational routines (e.g. Barbéris 1995;Aijmer 2004, but see Ameka 1992a, 1992bWierzbicka 1991Wierzbicka , 1992. Fortunately, that tendency has recently changed and over the last years there have arisen different classifications, which differentiate between the so-called emotive/expressive (1), conative/volitive (2), phatic and other types of interjections, depending on the criteria on which they are based (e.g.…”

“…Fortunately, that tendency has recently changed and over the last years there have arisen different classifications, which differentiate between the so-called emotive/expressive (1), conative/volitive (2), phatic and other types of interjections, depending on the criteria on which they are based (e.g. Wierzbicka 1991Wierzbicka , 1992Ameka 1992aAmeka , 2006Montes 1999) 4 .…”