Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics?
The case of early Soviet structuralism
If interjections are absent from the works of mature Soviet structuralists, from the 1920s to the 1950s Soviet linguists tried to include them into formal and systemic language descriptions. However, certain distinctive features of the formal and semantic structure of these words made Soviet pre-structuralists not only call into question their basic methods, but also cause the collapse of some of the principal oppositions forming the basis of the majority of structural approaches to the language, i.e. synchrony and diachrony; statics and dynamics; langue, langage and parole. Analysis of corresponding research shows that these difficulties could be explained by methodological specificities of Soviet linguistics at that time.