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Part of
Emotion in Discourse
Edited by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302] 2019
► pp. 87–112

Chapter 4
Interjections and emotions

The case of gosh

| Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)
| Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)

Interjections in general can be considered linguistic expressions of emotions and attitudes, constituting complete and self-contained utterances. Though all languages are believed to have ‘emotive interjections’, the literature on interjections and emotions has proved to be sparse, while studies on specific interjections are particularly uncommon. This study investigates the interjection gosh, which we propose to analyze as an expletive secondary interjection, originally used in the area of religion as a euphemistic replacement of ‘God’. With the religious connection practically severed, gosh can be revealed as non-stigmatized and, in general, positively-valued. It is clearly a mild expletive, with a wide range of emotive, cognitive and discourse-structure uses. By exploring components of the BNC and COCA corpora, this chapter contributes to the study of gosh in terms of further formal and functional features (position and syntactic peripheral behavior, discourse role in conversation, dialogic character) together with possible differences between British and American English. Looking at the behavior of gosh in our data, we claim that it is an interjection that functions as a pragmatic marker in present-day English.

Keywords: interjection, euphemistic, pragmatic marker, emotion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Primary and secondary interjections
    • 2.2The semantics of interjections
    • 2.3From God to gosh
    • 2.4Interjections as pragmatic markers
    • 2.5Grammaticalization
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4. Gosh in British and American spoken discourse
    • 4.1 Gosh: Phrases and position
    • 4.2 Gosh: Semantic meanings and discourse/pragmatic functions
      • 4.2.1 Gosh as an expression of emotion and cognition
      • 4.2.2Discursive and pragmatic uses of gosh
    • 4.3 Gosh as a pragmatic marker
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.302.04dow
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