This paper explores five emotive bilingual interjections: haba, kai, chei, chai, and mtchew in Nigerian English, using the theory of pragmatic borrowing from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic ...perspective. The data, which were extracted from the Nigerian component of the Global Web-based English corpus, were subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results show that haba and kai are borrowed from Hausa, chei and chai are loaned from Igbo while mtchew is an onomatopoeic interjection peculiar to many Nigerian indigenous cultures. The results also indicate that haba signals surprise, shock, anger, disapproval, disgust, distress, despair, disbelief, disappointment, and disagreement, kai, chai, and chei express feelings of surprise, sympathy, sadness, anger, pain, disapproval, and shock, while mtchew is shows anger, utter disgust, derision, disinterest and sadness. The study concludes that these emotive bilingual interjections further add to the distinctiveness of Nigerian English.
•Haba, kai, chei, chai and mtchew are emotive interjections.•They are loaned from indigenous Nigerian languages into Nigerian English.•Mtchew is onomatopoeic as it resembles a sound produced by Nigerians from different ethnic groups.•The interjections, on few occasions, collocate with other discourse-pragmatic features.•The interjections are mostly used to express strong negative emotions.
This article aims to identify the linguistic features of English-language educational discourse in terms of structural, descriptive, semantic, and cognitive-pragmatic analyses. The relevance of the ...study stems from the need to identify trends in the representation of language components in modern grammar textbooks within the communicative-pragmatic paradigm of educational discourse. The authors focus on the linguosynergetic potential of the English grammar textbook “English Grammar in Use” by Raymond Murphy, manifested in changes of certain discourse markers in all five editions. Employing a multimodal discourse analysis methodology, this research scrutinizes the verbal and visual disparities—encompassing graphic elements, letter capitalization, italics, font, and color—that hold pragmatic value and fulfill various roles, from engagement to information conveyance. The authors also investigate the interference of advertising and educational discourses and the small-format nature of texts in this self-study textbook, whose hypertext structure and internal navigational system serve as a surrogate for teacher guidance, thereby performing a directive function. A diachronic analysis of communicative scenarios within the textbook’s exercises reveals the dynamic utilization of interjections, underscoring their importance in creating an emotive-expressive backdrop that facilitates the acquisition of grammatical phenomena, reflective of their real-world application. Thus, in an attempt to represent the features of natural communication and to avoid the use of linguistic terms, the author of the textbook presents complex grammatical material in the most accessible form for a wide audience. Consequently, the study highlights the textbook’s increasing emphasis on the personality-bound component, complementing the traditionally dominant status-oriented approach in educational discourse.
The present work is composed of two parts: a theoretical part, in which some critical and personal considerations on the incident constructions are exposed, and the second part represents a ...qualitative-quantitative approach to the moments and sketches of I.L. Caragiale. In the theoretical part, the aim is to present incident constructions, especially in relation to GALR, where a complex and up-to-date classification of them is made from a semantic-functional point of view, into: allocutive incident constructions, direct speech reporting constructions, metadiscursive incident constructions, incident constructions with the role of pragmatic connectors, incident constructions with expressive function, with conative function, and verbal automatisms. However, according to the three basic features of incidents, namely the representation of an additional syntactic structure, the lack of syntactic links to the underlying utterance, and the provision of information of the type comment, explanation or direct speech reporting, it can be seen that not all the categories listed above fall into the narrow class of incidents, which is why we hypothesised that those categories that do not exhibit all three defining features of incidents belong to paranthetic constructions, a superclass of incidents. After this theoretical presentation, I carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the incident constructions with expressive function in Caragiale’s moments and sketches. The analysis was carried out manually and with the software Voyant Tool. From the category of incident expressive constructions, we first considered interjections and imprecations, as these are the most representatives for Caragiale’s work. As far as interjections are concerned, we made an inventory of them according to the number of occurrences, which showed that the most frequent interjections in Caragiale’s work are the interjections: a!, as!, ei! and uf!, followed by ah!, ei aș! o! aoleu! and ehei! Taking contexts and representative examples from Caragiale’s moments and sketches, we have analysed their semantic valences, highlighting the fact that interjections known positively in Caragiale’s work receive many more semantic nuances than those known negatively. Using concrete examples, the main semantic nuances identified were admiration, determination, disappointment, disapproval, dissimulation, exaltation, hesitation, anger, irritation, irony, melancholy, satisfaction, puzzlement, dissatisfaction, disbelief, fear, hope, surprise, suspicion, confusion, disappointment, indifference, irony, joy, boldness or even suffering. The semantic analysis of the interjections identified in Caragiale’s work was followed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the imprecations, which produced an impressive list of imprecations that suggest the linguistic inventiveness of the Romanian prose writer and support the orality of his style. Interestingly, most of the imprecations are found in the texts "Întârziere" and "Un pedagog de școală nouă", in the speech of a female character and a teacher, characters often associated with elevated language. Taken as a whole, all these incident expressive constructions, whether interjections or imprecations, are intended not only to emphasise the characters’ feelings, but are also evidence of their attitude and relationship to the world, to other characters and to society in general. Through the variety of semantic nuances they update and the multitude of forms identified in Caragiale’s texts, they acquire a central role in the articulation of the message and meanings.
This study investigates the Japanese interjections anoo and sonoo, both of which are pragmaticized from adnominal forms of distal demonstratives, and have been often associated with speaker's ...internal difficulties in searching for appropriate words or expressions. Observing these two tokens in natural conversation, we find that the differentiated interactional work that each interjection performs go far beyond marking a momentary problem with one's own speech production.
We demonstrate, instead, that by deploying anoo, speakers foreshadow an emerging shift in the interactional trajectory, i.e., what will follow is not a continuation of the immediately preceding context; while by deploying sonoo, speakers explicitly project that the following talk is in-line with what has been already established in the interaction, and should thus be construed as a non-deviation with reference to the existing or ongoing activity or project. Thus, while each of these two interjections work in halting the progressivity of the turn-at-talk, they are differentially used as resources to help participants orient to the emerging talk in its relation to the present context, and are thus useful linguistic resources that Japanese speakers employ to delicately navigate intersubjective orientation and understanding between participants.
•Japanese distal demonstratives can be deployed as interjections (anoo and sonoo).•This study demonstrates that they are not mere indications of disfluency.•Anoo flags that a new project or deviation from the current trajectory is upcoming.•Sonoo projects that the following talk is in-line with what has been established.•Each of them guides the recipient differently on how to construe the emerging talk.
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