Dans le cadre du séminaire "Le Corps du Texte", l'EA CLIMAS a le plaisir d'inviter Maruszka MEINARD, Université Lumière Lyon 2, pour une visioconférence de linguistique sur la syntaxe de l'interjection en langue anglaise. L'intervention se déroulera le jeudi 8 décembre 2022 16h30-17h30. Elle est ouverte à tous sur inscription préalable auprès de jrlapaire@u-bordeaux-
Abstract
On the Syntax of Interjections
Interjections have often been described as “asyntagmatic”, “syntactically isolated”, with a “syntax-external behavior”. In this presentation, I will first defend the idea that the primary function of these words is to enable the speaker to reduce the distance between their actual speaking performance (the actual utterances) and their intended speech (the ideal utterances). Then, I will show that interjections can be syntactically integrated, and will offer a hypothesis explaining their role in a sentence. More specifically, I will present a word formation strategy that I have called the “Syntactic Adjustment” (“SA”), and which consists in incorporating interjections into syntactic structures. I will describe the SA and expose some of the rules that restrict its use. To do this, I will compare the SA with converted interjections (yuck! > yucky ; oh God! > to be oh-Godding at something) and will also analyze a corpus of syntactically integrated interjections. Then I will show that this SA is merely the syntactic version of a strategy that can also be observed at the phonemic and at the lexical level and that could be described as a word formation process. I will make use of concepts developed in different theoretical frameworks, mainly in Cognitive Grammar, Generative Linguistics and Theory of Enunciative Operations.