Cover not available
Part of
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
References
Aijmer, Karin
1987 Oh and Ah in English conversation. In Corpus Linguistics and Beyond, Willem Meijs (ed), 61–86. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
2002 English Discourse Particles. Evidence from a Corpus [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 10]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle 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. & Wilkins, David P.
2006 Interjections. In Handbook of Pragmatics, Jan-Ola Ostman & Jef Verschueren (eds), 1–19. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Michael M.
1981 Discourse in the novel. In The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist (ed), 259–422. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla & Morra, Lucia
2000 Discourse markers and the indeterminacy of translation. In Argomenti per una linguistica della traduzione. Notes pour une linguistique de la traduction. On linguistic aspects of translation, Iørn Korzen & Carla Marello (eds), 149–157. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Google Scholar
Bolden, Galina
2006 Little words that matter: Discourse markers So and Oh and the doing of other-attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication 56: 661–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borreguero, Margarita & Martínez Caro, Elena
2018 La función de las partículas discursivas en el discurso directo citado. Un análisis contrastivo del español y el inglés. Paper presented at the XLVII Conference of the Spanish Linguistics Society (SEL), Universidad de Alicante.
Cambridge University Press
n.d.). Interjection. In Cambridge Dictionary: English Dictionary. [URL] (2 March 2021).
Carter, Ronald & McCarthy, Michael
2006 Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Spoken and Written Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1994 Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chaume, Frederic
2004 Discourse markers in audiovisual translating. Meta: Journal des Traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 49(4): 843–855. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Selting, Margret
2018 Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Socil Interaction. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Crible, Ludivine & Degand, Liesbeth
2019 Domains and functions: A two-dimensional account of discourse markers. Discours 24: 3–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuenca, Maria Josep
2000 Defining the undefinable? Interjections. Syntaxis 3: 29–44.Google Scholar
2006 Interjections and pragmatic errors in dubbing. Meta: Journal des Traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 51(1): 20–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Pragmatic markers in contrast: The case of well. Journal of Pragmatics 40(8): 1373–1391. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuenca, Maria Josep & Marín, Maria Josep
2009 Co-occurrence of discourse markers in Catalan and Spanish oral narrative. Journal of Pragmatics 41(5): 899–914. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cumming, Susanna & Ono, Tsuyoshi
1997 Discourse and grammar. In Discourse as Structure and Process, Teun van Dijk (ed), 112–137. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dideriksen, Christina, Fusaroli, Riccardo, Tylén, Kristian, Dingemanse, Mark, & Christiansen, Morten H.
2019 Contextualizing conversational strategies: Backchannel, repair and linguistic alignment in spontaneous and task-oriented conversations. In CogSci’19 (pp. 261–267). Cognitive Science Society. [URL] (25 July 2022). DOI logo
Dik, Simon C.
1997 The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part 2: Complex and Derived Constructions, Kees Hengeveld (ed). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Downing, Angela & Martínez Caro, Elena
2019 Interjections and emotions: The case of gosh. In Emotion in Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302], Laura Alba-Juez & J. Lachlan Mackenzie (eds), 87–112. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Wallace L. Chafe, Charles Meyer, Sandra A. Thompson, Robert Englebretson, & Nii Martey
2000–2005 Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1–4. Philadelphia PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Ducrot, Oswald
1984 Esquisse de un théorie poliphonique de l’énonciation. In Le dire et le dit, 171–237. Paris: Les editions de minuit.Google Scholar
Edeso, Verónica
2004 Las interjecciones en la enseñanza de ELE: Significados expresivos de la interjección oh. In Proceedings of the XV Conference of ASELE, María Auxiliadora Castillo Carballo, Olga Cruz Moya, Juan Manuel García Platero, Juan Pablo Mora Gutiérrez & M.ª Regla Cordero Raffo (eds), 326–333. [URL] (25 July 2022).
Fox Tree, Jean E. & Schrock, Josef C.
1999 Discourse markers in spontaneous speech: Oh what a difference an Oh makes. Journal of Memory and Language 40: 280–95. 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
Heritage, John
1998 Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society 27(3): 291–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 Oh-prefaced responses to assessments: a method of modifying agreement/disagreement. In The Language of Turn and Sequence, Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson (eds), 196–224. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2018 Turn-initial particles in English: The cases of Oh and Well. In Between Turn and Sequence: Turn Initial Particles across Languages [Studies in Language and Social Interaction 31], John Heritage & Marja Leena Sorjonen (eds), 155–189. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koehn, Philipp
2005 Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. Paper presented at MT Summit X: The 10th Machine Translation Summit, Phuket, 12–16 September.
Labov, William & Waletzky, Joshua
1967 Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7(1–4): 3–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macbeth, Douglas, Wong, Jean & Lynch, Michael
2016 The story of ‘Oh’, Part 1: Indexing structure, animating transcript. Discourse Studies 18(5): 550–573. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macbeth, Douglas & Wong, Jean
2016 The story of ‘Oh’, Part 2: Animating transcript. Discourse Studies 18(5): 574–596. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macmillan Education
n.d.). Interjection. In Macmillan English Dictionary. [URL] (2 March 2021).
Matamala, Anna
2007 The translation of oh in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 6: 117–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Norén, Kerstin & Linell, Per
2007 Meaning potentials and the interaction between lexis and contexts: An empirical substantiation. Pragmatics 17(3): 387–416.Google Scholar
Norrick, Neil R.
2009 Interjections as pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 866–891. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2009 Towards an alternative relevance-theoretic approach to interjections. International Review of Pragmatics 1(1): 182–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pearson English Language Teaching
n.d.). Interjection. In Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online. [URL] (2 March 2021).
Porroche, Margarita
2015 Sobre la marcación del discurso en español. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 62: 10–31.Google Scholar
Ramón, Noelia
2015 The English discourse particle oh in Spanish translations: Evidence from a parallel corpus. Procedia. Social and Behavioral Sciences 173: 337–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Real Academia Española
n.d.). Diccionario de la lengua española, 23th ed. [URL] (accessed 13 March 2021).
Schachter, Paul & Shopen, Timothy
2007 Parts-of-speech systems. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 1, Timothy Shopen (ed), 1–60. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah
1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Svartvik, Jan
(ed) 1990 The London Corpus of Spoken English: Description and Research. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2020 The development of “digressive” discourse-topic shift markers in English. Journal of Pragmatics 156: 121–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trester, Anna Marie
2009 Discourse marker ‘oh’ as a means for realizing the identity potential of constructed dialogue in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2): 147–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilkins, David P.
1992 Interjections as deictics. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 119–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yngve, Victor
1970 On getting a word in edgewise. In Papers from the Sixth Regional Meeting of Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago IL: CLS.Google Scholar
Zamora, Pablo & Alessandro, Arianna
2016 Frequency of use and functions of Italian and Spanish interjections in film language and their impact on their Spanish dubbing. Translating Orality 3(7) [MonTI Special Issue 3trans]: 1–30.Google Scholar