Interpreting Emotional Interjections as Signs of Perception

The problem with linguistic analysis of interjections is that they cannot be described & interpreted by traditional linguistic methods. This is not surprising, considering that interjections do not describe the external world, do not carry grammatical information, do not modify the meaning of a sentence, & are not part of it. Traditional lexicological approaches to interjections is to list the emotions associated with them. However, such descriptions are rather open-ended. A new classification of Russian interjections is proposed, based on Wierbicka's (1999) work. This classification is based on universal semantic components such as "good," "bad," "feel," "think," & "know." A distinction is drawn between the meaning of a given interjection & the emotions it can be associated with. This avoids the open-endedness of the previous analyses. The syntagmatic properties of interjections are considered. Four syntagmatic positions are distinguished: (1) the direct bodily reaction to the stimulus, (2) the attempt to identify the stimulus, (3) the act of characterization of the stimulus, & (4) the evaluation of the stimulus. Numerous examples of interjections from each of these categories are provided. 20 References. A. Pereltsvaig