Syntactic definition of interjections

Abstract

This paper discuses syntactic definition of interjections starting from the definitions of that word class in Croatian grammars. As the analysis shows, interjections in Croatian grammars are defined as words which reflect the attitude of the speaker, they cannot be parts of a sentence and they (by themselves) represent a certain type of a sentence. Even though the interjection/interjector is defined as non-syntactic unit, the analysis and some of the grammar descriptions show that interjector can function as parts of a sentence (e.g. I’ve heard ouch). However, the prototype function of the interjector is not part of a sentence: Hey, what are you doing is probably the most frequent type of the use of the interjector. In this paper, that function of the word is understood as exclamation/exclamator which is defined as supra-syntactic function. In that sense, exclamator is deictic, it actualizes the meaning (and structure) of whole sentences and it is distributionaly autonomous, i.e. it is not structurally related to the sentence in which it is used. The exclamator is primarily the function of interjector, but verb forms, nouns, greetings and any other word or phrase can be exclamator in a specific context in which it has three features listed above. In this regard, a clear distinction between morphology and syntax is made, between word class and functions of the word in a specific language use.

Keywords

• interjections
• exclamations
• morphology
• syntax
• Croatian language