Schedule 78. Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft

The aim of this study is to introduce interjections and survey their distribution in terms of their phonological, semantic, and functional properties from cross-linguistic and cross-modal perspective. Despite their ubiquity in colloquial language interjections have often been neglected in linguistics by being labeled peripheral, extra-linguistic or anomalous due to their tendency not to fit into water-tight categorisation as grammatical word-class since they exhibit atypical phonological patterns, lack syntactic embedding, and rely heavily on discourse context for interpretation, however they are among the most frequent and functionally indispensable elements of language in spoken languages and sign(ed) languages. The study then highlights that interjections are a near-universal property of language with different categories of interjections like continuers, repair initiators, and change-of-state tokens with data from genealogically and areally different languages from my fieldwork and other academic works. Following that, it turns to culture-specific elaborations including kin-sensitive or ritualised interjections such as Yanyuwa forms /ŋalamu/ and /wari/ which are used in conventionalised social scenarios depending on the kin relations or Bininj Gun-wok practicing different interjections after a sneeze according to the clan of the sneezer. Ultimately, this study demonstrates interjections are an independent grammatical word-class with a near-universal distribution across languages and modalities with evidence from a variety of languages.

Info

Day: 2025-11-13
Start time: 15:45
Duration: 00:30
Room: M17.25
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar

Feedback

Click here to let us know how you liked this event.