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Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective
Edited by Alessandra Barotto and Simone Mattiola
[Studies in Language Companion Series 227] 2023
► pp. 369–401

Chapter 13
English oh as a structural and modal marker

A contrastive analysis with Spanish

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Among interjections, a class often neglected in grammars, English oh is one of the most highly frequent and multifunctional types, generally considered a discourse marker. The present contribution investigates this item, for a better understanding of its uses and meanings in interaction, and explores its equivalents in Spanish. As the corpus-based analysis reveals, oh mostly occurs in the modal and textual-structural domains, and among the specific functions found in these, special attention is devoted to the role of oh to demarcate structural ties between discourse units. It is argued that English oh should be considered in the literature within the set of markers of topic shift and topic boundaries, and its knowledge expanded beyond the expression of affective and epistemic meanings.
Keywords: interjections, discourse markers, English, Spanish, discourse topic boundaries
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Research goals and methodology
  • 4.Oh: Properties and meanings in English
    • 4.1English ‘oh’: Position, prosody and collocations
    • 4.2Meanings and uses of English ‘oh’: Domains and functions
    • 4.3‘Oh’ as a marker of discourse organisation in English
    • 4.4Concluding remarks on the meanings and uses of English ‘oh’
  • 5.A contrastive analysis with Spanish
    • 5.1Concluding remarks on the contrastive analysis
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 1 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.227.13mar
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