Chapter published in:
Emotion in Discourse
Edited by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302] 2019
► pp. 87–112

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
Published online: 27 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.302.04dow
References

References

Aijmer, Karin
2002 English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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 https://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/coca/.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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1999 “What are Discourse Markers?” Journal of Pragmatics 31 (7): 931‒952.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff
2014 “Interjections and Emotion (with Special Reference to ‘Surprise’ and ‘Disgust’).” Emotion Review 6 (1): 53‒63.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet
1990 “Hedges and Boosters in Women’s and Men’s Speech.” Language and Communication 10 (3): 185‒205.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1995 “Subjectification in Grammaticalisation.” In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Dieter Stein & Susan Wright, 31‒54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006 English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wilkins, David P.
1992 “Interjections as Deictics.” Journal of Pragmatics 18: 119‒158.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Jing, Yi
2021. Interpersonal functions of interjections. Functions of Language 28:1 ► pp. 81 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 november 2021. 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.