On Defining the Interjection in Contemporary Russian
1971; American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/306037
ISSN2325-7687
Autores Tópico(s)Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies
ResumoSince Lomonosov, grammarians concerned with Russian have applied the term interjection to one or more of the following sets of words :1 1) ox 'oh' t'fu 'phooey' oj 'ouch' 2) da 'yes' net 'no' to-to 'you don't say' 3a) ej 'hey' na 'here, take this' ts 'sh' 3b) agu 'goo-goo' ps 'pee-pee' am 'eat this' 3c) tpru 'whoa, horse' ks-ks 'here, kitty' ks-ks 'shoo, bird' 4a) xrju-xrju 'oink-oink' gav-gay 'bow-wow' krja-krja 'quackquack' 4b) xlop 'wham, bang' trax 'crash, bang' Sl~p 'smack' We may label these sets informally as: 1) exclamatives; 2) responses; 3) calls or commands, some addressed primarily to children (3b), some to animals (3c); and 4) onomatopoetic forms. One or more members of 2, 3, and 4 have often been classified in groups separate from the interjection per se, as resembling the latter in structure and in syntactic behavior, but differing from it in meaning and function.2 This article is an attempt to clarify the position of these word types in Russian by answering the following questions: To what extent do they constitute a single grammatical (formal/distributional) class? If they do, what common semantic characteristics correspond to their shared grammatical properties? The sets in question seem intuitively to belong together as peripheral, usually stylistically marked elements.3 Yet at the same time the sets appear quite heterogeneous in use and meaning: they seem to belong to different functions of language, e.g., emotive, appellative, or quotational.4 In characterizing the Russian interjection as a part of speech scholars have first noted its negative properties, e.g., absence of the usual connections with other words in a sentence, lack of inflectional and derivational morphology, and absence of conceptual (denotative) meaning. Grammarians have also observed several positive traits, such as the presence of special sounds (e.g., [h], [w]) or of a special distribution of sounds (e.g., [t'f], [e] in word-initial position);5 reduplicative morphology (oj-oj-oj, da-da, nu-nu, ks-ks, xlop-xlop) ; marginal suffixation (nate-ka, agusen'ki) ;6
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