Chapter 6

Anchoring primary and secondary interjections to the context

On the basis of empirical evidence from various Italian dialects, I argue that primary and secondary interjections lexicalize different functional heads which are computed syntactically at the edge of the clause. Secondary interjections should be clearly distinguished from primary ones; only secondary interjections lexicalizing a SpeechAct° head represent autonomous speech acts and are prosodically and syntactically independent from the co-occurring clause, which they can attract to their specifier position, raising eventually to the adjacent head Speaker° in order to achieve the necessary spatio-temporal contextual anchoring. Primary interjections, which can co-occur with secondary ones and surface clause-initially, lexicalize arguably the highest functional head Speaker°, interacting in interesting ways with lower projections and with the overt realization of the complementizer in Force.