The semantics of interjection

This paper argues that interjections - like any other linguistic elements - have their meaning, and that this meaning can be identified and captured in the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and her colleagues. A number of interjections from English, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish are discussed, and rigorous semantic formulae are proposed which can explain both the similarities and the differences in their range of use. For example, the English interjection yuk! is compared and contrasted with its nearest Polish and Russian counterparts fu!, fe!, tfu!. The author shows that while the meaning of interjections cannot be adequately captured in terms of emotion words such as disgust, it can be captured in terms of more fine-grained components, closer to the level of universal semantic primitives. The role of sound symbolism in the functioning of interjections is discussed, and the possibility of reflecting this symbolism in the semantic formulae is explored.