The interjection in old Romanian texts
The interjection in old Romanian texts

Summary/Abstract: The paper tries to identify the special problems posed by the study of interjection based on the examination of a corpus of texts from the old Romanian (1600–1780), referring to texts from modern Romanian. We have watched how certain interjectional formations have acquired, through diachronic expansion, new grammatical, semantic and pragmatic values.The structure of the paper is the following: the introduction (§1) summarizes the author’s position on the status of the interjection category at a morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic level (§1.1) and on the relation between different linguistic structures and their grammaticalization / pragmaticalization process (§1.2). The second section (§2) refers to the specific routes followed by the evolution of the various categories of the analysed interjections, from the old Romanian to the modern Romanian: the presentatives adecă, iată, ni (§2.1), the hortatives haide, ni (§2.2), the addressing particles bre, măi (§2.3), the connectors with demarcation signal function adevăr, amin (§2.4). The third section (§3) has as objective the description of a species of delocutive derivation, illustrated in Romanian by the lexicalized semantic variants of the secondary interjection Doamne!. The study concludes with several final considerations regarding the results of the research (§4).

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