I will Wow You! Pragmatic Interjections Revisited (Essay‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Historically, interjections have been regarded as marginal to language. Latin grammarians described them as non-words, independent of syntax, signifying only feelings or states of mind (Wharton, 2003). Nineteenth-century linguists regarded them as paralinguistic, even non-linguistic phenomena. They believed that "between interjection and word there is a chasm wide enough to allow us to say that interjection is the negation of language" (Benfey, 1869, p. 295), or that "language begins where interjections end" (Muller, 1862, p. 366). Accordingly, interjections have been regarded as the words or phrases that have expressive functions or, in other words, are mostly used to express the speaker's feelings or emotions. There are also other words or word combinations which are regarded as interjections since they have an expressive function; these words originally belong to the category of nouns or adjectives. Whatever their meanings outside the interjectional use are, as interjections, such words express the immediate feelings of the speaker.