Cover not available
Part of
Emotion in Discourse
Edited by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302] 2019
► pp. 87–112

Chapter 4
Interjections and emotions

The case of gosh

 | Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)
 | Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)
Interjections in general can be considered linguistic expressions of emotions and attitudes, constituting complete and self-contained utterances. Though all languages are believed to have ‘emotive interjections’, the literature on interjections and emotions has proved to be sparse, while studies on specific interjections are particularly uncommon. This study investigates the interjection gosh, which we propose to analyze as an expletive secondary interjection, originally used in the area of religion as a euphemistic replacement of ‘God’. With the religious connection practically severed, gosh can be revealed as non-stigmatized and, in general, positively-valued. It is clearly a mild expletive, with a wide range of emotive, cognitive and discourse-structure uses. By exploring components of the BNC and COCA corpora, this chapter contributes to the study of gosh in terms of further formal and functional features (position and syntactic peripheral behavior, discourse role in conversation, dialogic character) together with possible differences between British and American English. Looking at the behavior of gosh in our data, we claim that it is an interjection that functions as a pragmatic marker in present-day English.
Keywords: interjection, euphemistic, pragmatic marker, emotion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Primary and secondary interjections
    • 2.2The semantics of interjections
    • 2.3From God to gosh
    • 2.4Interjections as pragmatic markers
    • 2.5Grammaticalization
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Gosh in British and American spoken discourse
    • 4.1Gosh: Phrases and position
    • 4.2Gosh: Semantic meanings and discourse/pragmatic functions
      • 4.2.1Gosh as an expression of emotion and cognition
      • 4.2.2Discursive and pragmatic uses of gosh
    • 4.3Gosh as a pragmatic marker
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.302.04dow
References (42)
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2002. English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alyn, Kimberly. 2003. Soar with your Savior. USA: Xulon Press.Google Scholar
Ameka, Felix K. 1992. “Interjections: The Universal yet Neglected Part of Speech.” Journal of Pragmatics 18: 101‒118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ameka, Felix K. & David P. Wilkins. 2006. “Interjections.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren, 1‒22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beeching, Kate & Ulrich Detges. 2014. “Introduction.” In Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic Investigations of Language Use and Language Change, ed. by Kate Beeching & Ulrich Detges, 1‒23. Leiden/Boston MA: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics, tr. by M. E. Meek. Coral Gables FL: University of Miami Press.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carter, Ronald & Michael McCarthy. 2006. Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Spoken and Written Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cook, Haruko M. 1999. “Particles.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1–2): 181‒183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuenca, Maria Josep. 2000. “Defining the Undefinable? Interjections.” Syntaxis 3: 29‒44.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990-present. Available online at [URL].Google Scholar
Degand, Liesbeth. 2014. “‘So very fast then’: Discourse Markers at Left and Right Periphery in Spoken French.” In Discourse Functions at the Left and Right Periphery: Crosslinguistic Investigations of Language Use and Language Change, ed. by Kate Beeching & Ulrich Detges, 151‒174. Leiden/Boston MA: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Downing, Angela. 2001. “‘Surely you knew!’ Surely as a Marker of Evidentiality and Stance.” Functions of Language 8 (2): 251‒282.Google Scholar
. 2009. “From Manner Adverb to Stance Marker: Surely, (Inter-)Subjectivity and English Cultural Norms.” In Corpora and Discourse – and Stuff: Papers in Honour of Karin Aijmer, ed. by Rhonwen Bowen, Mats Mobärg & Sölve Ohlander, 13‒21. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg.Google Scholar
Fischer, Kerstin, ed. 2006. Approaches to Discourse Particles. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Foolen, Ad. 2012. “Pragmatic Markers in a Socio-Pragmatic Perspective.” In Pragmatics of Society, ed. by Gisle Andersen & Karin Aijmer, 217‒242. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce. 1996. “Pragmatic Markers.” Pragmatics 6 (2): 167‒190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1999. “What are Discourse Markers?” Journal of Pragmatics 31 (7): 931‒952. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2014. “Interjections and Emotion (with Special Reference to ‘Surprise’ and ‘Disgust’).” Emotion Review 6 (1): 53‒63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2004. “The Role of Multiple Themes in Cohesion.” In Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora, ed. by Karin Aijmer & Anna-Brita Stenström, 65‒88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1990. “Hedges and Boosters in Women’s and Men’s Speech.” Language and Communication 10 (3): 185‒205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth C. Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ljung, Magnus. 2009. “A Study of Expletive Interjections in Spoken British English.” In Corpora and Discourse – and Stuff: Papers in Honour of Karin Aijmer, ed. by Rhonwen Bowen, Mats Mobärg & Sölve Ohlander, 199‒211. Gothenburg: University of GothenburgGoogle Scholar
Lynneng, Nina Therese Rem. 2015. “Oh my goodness!”: A Corpus Investigation of Euphemisms from a Sociolinguistic Perspective. MA Thesis, University of Oslo.Google Scholar
Martínez Caro, Elena & Margarita Borreguero. 2016. “Discourse Markers in Reported Speech: Evidence from English and Spanish.” Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Functional Discourse Grammar (IC-FDG 2016), University of Vienna.
Maschler, Yael. 1998. “Rotsé lishmoa ketà? ‘Wanna hear something weird/funny [lit. ‘a segment’]?’: The Discourse Markers Segmenting Israeli Hebrew Talk-in-Interaction.” In Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker & Yael Ziv, 13‒60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maschler, Yael & Deborah Schiffrin. 2015. “Discourse markers: Language, Meaning, and Context.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin, 189‒221. 2nd edition. Chichester: Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Norrick, Neal. 2009. “Interjections as Pragmatic Markers.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 866‒891. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortony, Andrew, Gerald L. Clore & Allan Collins. 1990. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Redeker, Gisela. 2006. “Discourse Markers as Attentional Cues at Discourse Transitions.” In Approaches to Discourse Particles, ed. by Kerstin Fischer, 339–358. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 2001. “Discourse markers: Language, Meaning, and Context.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E. Hamilton, 54‒75. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1972. The History of English Syntax. Holt, Rinehart and Wilson.Google Scholar
. 1989. “On the Rise of Epistemic Meanings in English: An Example of Subjectification in Semantic Change.” Language 65: 31‒55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1995. “Subjectification in Grammaticalisation.” In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Dieter Stein & Susan Wright, 31‒54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wharton, Tim. 2002. “Interjections, Language and the Showing/Telling Continuum.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12: 173–213.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1992. Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. 1999. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilkins, David P. 1992. “Interjections as Deictics.” Journal of Pragmatics 18: 119‒158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Peltier, Joy P. G.
2024. Pragmatic Markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik, French, & English: Language Contact & Creole Emergence through the Lens of Powerful Little Words. Études créoles 41 | 1-2 DOI logo
Telgozhayeva, Kuralay, Gulbany Kossymova, Zaure Sovetova & Khadisha Telgozhayeva
2024. The pragmatism of emotional-expressive words in Kazakh linguistics: A study of M. Auezov’s ‘The Way of Abai’. Applied Linguistics DOI logo
Martínez Caro, Elena
2023. English oh as a structural and modal marker. In Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective [Studies in Language Companion Series, 227], ► pp. 369 ff. DOI logo
Jing, Yi
2021. Interpersonal functions of interjections. Functions of Language 28:1 ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.