Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions (original) (raw)
Related papers
The meaning of phatic and conative interjections
Journal of Pragmatics, 1992
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the meanings of the members of two subclasses of interjections in Ewe: the conative/volitive which are directed at an auditor, and the phatic which are used in the maintenance of social and communicative contact. It is demonstrated that interjections like other linguistic signs have meanings which can be rigorously stated. In addition, the paper explores the differences and similarities between the semantic structures of interjections on one hand and formulaic words on the other. This is done through a comparison of the semantics and pragmatics of an interjection and a formulaic word which are used for welcoming people in Ewe. It is contended that formulaic words are speech acts qua speech acts while interjections are not fully fledged speech acts because they lack illocutionary dictum in their semantic structure.
2015
The functions of linguistic units labelled as ‘interjections’ are both to express affection, to share emotive or will emphasis between the participants at the conversation, and/or to monitor and organize the discourse. Folding traditional interjection classifications on language functions, this paper proposes a taxonomy that tries to maintain both idiomatic shades offered by Romanian grammars and discursive, spoken-performance features emphasized by English grammars classifications. The most important characteristic that makes a word an interjection is considered its inner referential source, the fact that through an interjection the speaker transmits something of the idiomatic inner self. Due to phonological resemblance, to frequent pragmatic gains of expressivity, the open-class of onomatopoeia is also included within the area of research of this paper, together with those discourse markers that are not conventionalized, with an inner referential source. This classification proves...
Interjections and the Language Functions Debate
Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas Bulletin, 2008
Five views of the function of interjections, developed in the first half of the 20 th century by the psychologist-linguist Bühler, the linguists Gardiner, and Jakobson, and the psychologists Révész and Duijker, are discussed. All five scholars reject the earlier psychologism that reinforced the traditional emotion-expressive view of interjections; all of them argue for a listener-directed, communicative view of language in general, and all include a specific appeal-to-the-listener-function in their model of language functions. My original hypothesis was therefore that these scholars would reject the one-sided traditional view that interjections mainly express the speaker's emotions, acknowledging instead that the central function of most interjections is to make some appeal to the listener (a view supported by recent investigation of a corpus of spoken Dutch, which shows that only 7% fulfils a purely expressive function). As it turns out, however, all five scholars support the traditional view and attributed an expressive function to interjections. In this paper I try to explain this unexpected result.
4 Stylistic Features of Language
Speech communication employs a host of expressive means ranging from linguistic to paralinguistic and extralinguistic features. It is the natural language, however, whose systematic variation on all levels of its structure (phonology, morphology, lexicology and syntax) offers the widest possibilities of suiting its use to fit communicative functions of discourses in various contexts. Thus linguistic expressive means, which are systematically identified and cetegorized by linguistic stylistics (stylolinguistics), lie at the core of stylistic variation. However, it should be noted that as stylistically relevant are considered those linguistic variations which perform similar or alternative communicative functions and which are, in fact, competitors within a particular paradigm or category. From this perspective, there are language units which occur in all types of texts due to their neutral stylistic value (hence stylistically neutral units, e.g., notional words, -s plural marker). On the other hand, other language units bear a stylistic marker already before they are actually used, and so they tend to occur only in some types of texts (hence stylistically marked units, e.g., terms, some foreign plural nouns, vulgarisms, participial constructions; these ´bearers´ of stylistic information which may come from any linguistic plane are also called stylemes, štylémy, cf. Mistrík 1993). Further, not all levels of language system offer equal possibilities of choice: the most differentiated level is the wordstock (synonymy and polysemy), and the fewest possibilities of selection are on the phonological plane (phonemic variations). The possibilities of stylistic variations are not unlimited and some authors maintain that the importance of style is often overestimated (cf. Čermák 2001).
SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2023
This article aims at offering an analysis of interjections and some items called "expletive slot fillers" in terms of word-formation processes. We will offer a semantic description of interjections within a Cognitive Grammar framework. We will make use of the Script-Theory to offer a semantic description of adjectives derived from interjections. We will display some of the operations underlying the derivation and conversion of interjections. We will show that primary interjections are produced by a word-formation process that we call "reshaping" and will show that this wordformation process can be observed at the phonemic, lexical and syntactic level. At the syntactic level, this word formation process serves to produce "expletive slot fillers" (e.g. taboo words like damned and fucking), we call it "Syntactic Adjustment" (SA). Finally, we will compare two different types of adjectival forms: true adjectives derived from interjections (like yucky and yummy) on the one hand, and interjections that undergo the SA process (like damned and fucking), on the other hand. The SA consists in integrating interjections to syntactic structures, generally thanks to the addition of a past or present participle morpheme ([[damn] + [-ed] + NOUN]).
Functions of the Nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and Illocutionary Force
Communication Theory, 2010
The term “emoticons”—short for “emotion icons”—refers to graphic signs, such as the smiley face, that often accompany computer-mediated textual communication. They are most often characterized as iconic indicators of emotion, conveyed through a communication channel that is parallel to the linguistic one. In this article, it is argued that this conception of emoticons fails to account for some of their important uses. We present a brief outline of speech act theory and use it to provide a complementary account of emoticons, according to which they also function as indicators of illocutionary force. We conclude by considering how our analysis bears upon broader questions concerning language, bodily behavior, and text.Fonctions du non-verbal dans la communication par ordinateur : les émoticônes et la force illocutoireEli Dresner & Susan HerringLe terme «émoticônes» (un mot-valise composé des termes «émotions» et «icônes») réfère à des signes graphiques, tels que la binette (smiley face), qui accompagnent souvent la communication textuelle par ordinateur. Les émoticônes sont le plus souvent utilisées comme des indicateurs icôniques des émotions, traduites par un conduit de communication parallèle au conduit linguistique. Dans cet article, il est soumis que cette conception des émoticônes n’explique pas certains de leurs usages importants. Nous présentons un bref aperçu de la théorie des actes de langage et nous l’utilisons pour offrir une vision complémentaire des émoticônes, qui conçoit qu’ils fonctionnent aussi comme des indicateurs de force illocutoire. Nous concluons par une réflexion sur les conséquences de notre analyse pour les enjeux de langage, de comportement corporel et de texte.Die Funktionen des Nonverbalen in der computervermittelten Kommunikation: Emoticons und ihr illokativer EinflussEli Dresner & Susan HerringDer Begriff ,,Emoticons“, kurz für ,,Emotionssymbole“, bezeichnet grafische Zeichen wie beispielsweise ein Smiley-Gesicht, die oft in Zusammenhang mit computervermittelter Textkommunikation auftreten. Charakterisiert werden sie zumeist als ikonische Indikatoren von Emotionen, die als Kommunikationskanal parallel zum linguistischen Kanal zum Ausdruck kommen. In diesem Artikel argumentieren wir, dass dieses Verständnis von Emoticons zu kurz greift und deren Wichtigkeit unterschätzt. Wir präsentieren einen kurzen Abriss der Sprechakttheorie und nutzen diese, um den komplementären Wert von Emoticons als Indikatoren einer illokativen Kraft herauszuarbeiten. Wir schließen mit der Diskussion darüber, wie unsere Analyse in einen breiten Kontext von Sprache, körperlichen Verhalten und Text eingebettet werden kann.Las Funciones No-verbales en la CMC:Los Emoticons y la Fuerza IlocucionalEli Dresner & Susan HerringDepartment of Communication, Tel Aviv University, P.O. Box 39040, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, IsraelResumenEl término “emoticons”—breve para “íconos de emoción”—se refiere a los signos gráficos, tales como la cara sonriente, que a menudo acompañan la comunicación textual mediada por la computadora. Ellos son más a menudo caracterizados como indicadores icónicos de la emoción, expresados a través de un canal de comunicación que es paralelo al lingüístico. En este artículo, se arguye que esta concepción de los emoticons falla en explicar algunos de sus usos importantes. Presentamos un esquema breve de la teoría del acto del discurso y lo usamos para proveer una explicación complementaria de los emoticons, de acuerdo con el cual ellos funcionan también como indicadores de la fuerza ilocucional. .Concluimos mediante una consideración de cómo nuestros análisis se relacionan con las preguntas mayores concernientes al lenguaje, el comportamiento del cuerpo, y el texto.
On the origin and meaning of secondary interjections: A relevance-theoretic proposal
A. Piskorska and E. Wałaszewska (eds.), Applications of Relevance Theory: From Discourse to Morphemes, 2017
This paper seeks to propose an account of the origin of ‘secondary’ interjections on the basis of some Relevance-theoretic postulates about lexical pragmatics and how concepts behave (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995, 1997; Carston 1997, 2002; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). Secondary interjections are words transferred from the word-classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Like ‘primary’ interjections, they have an independent semantic value and are used as stand-alone utterances to express emotions, feelings or attitudes (Wierzbicka 1991, 1992; Ameka 1992, 2006). Most research on interjections has focused on primary ones and analysed their usage, characteristics, functions and values in distinct interactional contexts in certain languages or varieties. Within relevance theory, Wharton (2003, 2009) analysed the whole class of interjections in procedural terms. Concerning secondary interjections, researchers have examined their sociolinguistic distribution and peculiarities in different languages and varieties; their meanings in situational, discourse and social contexts, or their function as discourse markers. As a result, secondary interjections have been claimed to constitute a more creative sub-type than primary ones because they are open to constant innovations (Quirk et al., 1985; Buridant 2006). Regrettably, the origin of secondary interjections, i.e. why items belonging to the word-classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs may be transferred to that of interjections, has not attracted much attention. Secondary interjections have been argued to arise after a process of ‘grammaticalisation’ by means of which the lexical entries of the items from which they originate acquire a new grammatical and morphological status. Consequently, those items can encode a more abstract and general semantic content. This process enables those items to communicate concepts that they did not previously encode (Traugott 1989, 1995; Hopper 1991; Hopper and Traugott 1993). Also, this process has been explained as a process of ‘subjectification’ (Traugott 1992, 1995). However, the reason why such grammaticalisation happens and some lexical items belonging to those word-classes enter that of interjections might reside in some lexical pragmatic processes affecting those items. This is what this paper suggests. This paper proposes that the conceptual content of those lexical items might undergo a process of ‘broadening’. This process would be motivated by speakers’ expressive abilities or preferences. By comparing the transfer of items from various lexical categories of the phenomenon of ‘overextension’ characteristic of children’s language (Wałaszewska 2011), this paper also suggests that adjectives and adverbs might undergo a type of broadening known as ‘over-inclusion’, while nouns and verbs might undergo another type of broadening known as ‘analogical extension’. The result would be a fuzzier and more general pro-concept denoting emotions, feelings or attitudes. Consequently, some items initially belonging to certain word-classes could stabilise in the linguistic system as devices to express specific types of emotions, feelings or attitudes. Finally, since many secondary interjections seem to be used to express various emotions, feelings or attitudes, this paper also proposes that their conceptual content might undergo a further broadening motivated by some of their uses and labels it ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ broadening.