Romanian Interjections as Discourse Markers
Romanian Interjections as Discourse Markers

Summary/Abstract: Ignored by the traditional grammar because of their non-words status the interjections have been placed under a new focus from a pragmatic perspective and recognized as discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987, Fraser 1990). Due to their complex functionality the interjections allow multiple perspectives in recent studies: syntactic (Krieb 2001), pragmatic (Vasilescu 2001, Ștefănescu 2007, Pop 2009), contrastive (Pop 2001, 2003). From the point of view of intercultural pragmatics Romanian language is considered to be an interjectional language that uses interjections as signals to the addressees by comparison with French that uses more message structuring markers (Pop 2006). Certain Romanian interjections with numerous occurrences in spontaneous conversations have been pragmatised during the evolution of language for expressing numerous roles: repair markers, answer particles, topic signals etc.The corpus-driven analysis explores several corpora of Romanian spoken interactions and will demonstrate that certain Romanian interjections (such as a! and e!) are no longer simply emotional or affective words, but significant tools pragmaticalised for expressing an important range of functions: feedback signals, repair markers, answer particles, topic signals, etc. Most examples are excerpted from transcribed familiar conversations published in corpora of spoken Romanian (CORV, CRVA, IVLRA1, IVLRA2, ROVA) and from literature.

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