Meaning and acceptability of Swedish interjections

• A possible measure of ambiguity in emotional interjections is studied in subjects' assignments of emotional meanings and acceptance of emotional interjections. The meaning and use of 19 Swedish emotional interjections was studied in a questionnaire. The purpose was to try to establish a measure of high-lexical and low-lexical interjections (cf. Dietrich et al, 2006) and a measure of ambiguity. A questionnaire was distributed to 50 undergraduate students asking them to assign one of the five emotions happy, angry, sad, fearful or disgusted to each one of the interjections. The subjects were also asked to say whether they used the interjection or not, or only jokingly. The data were compared with results from a lexical decision experiment on high-lexical and low-lexical interjections in Swedish. The results found were that some interjections were assigned only one emotional meaning while other interjections were assigned up to five emotional meanings. A seemingly contradictory result was that among the emotions that were reported as scarcely used were the emotions that most subjects agreed on and which seemed less ambiguous. Data from a lexical decision experiment shows that the lesser-used interjections have longer reaction times than the more frequently used interjections. There is also a tendency that lesser used interjections are phonologically longer than the more frequent ones. The question of ambiguity is discussed. Should interjections like 'oh', which have different emotional prosodies, count as one ambiguous interjection or as several different morphemes, i.e. as neither polysemy nor homonymy? If emotional prosody is seen as specified in the phonological representation, many emotional interjections are not homonymous/polysemous but instead they represent different morphemes. Interjections with different prosody are claimed to represent different morphemes and not to be ambiguous morphemes.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

ambiguity

emotion

interjection

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)