Interjections as pragmatic particles in Modern Greek: Using diverse corpora in identifying pragmatic functions

The paper offers an overview of the frequency and functions of three basic interjections in Greek, the phonologically minimal α /a/ ‘ah, huh’, ε /e/ ‘eh’ and ω or ο /o/ ‘oh’, with the aim of identifying the full range of their uses that have not been dealt with in the literature, which mainly treats them as elements denoting emotions. The data comes from a variety of Modern Greek corpora, including the conversational and the literary sub-corpora of the Corpus of Greek Texts (CGT, 1990–2010), the Corpus of Greek Film Dialogue and, for reasons of diachronic comparison, the Diachronic Corpus of Greek of the 20th Century (CGT20, 1900–1989). The findings suggest that, although a and e are both found among the 50 most frequent items, e is three times more frequent that a, while o is almost non-existent in conversation, in contrast to literary data, especially from an earlier period. In addition, a, e and o have developed a range of functions beyond mere exclamation, which include indexing surprise or sudden realization, use in address or as attention signals, evaluation, intensification, the drawing of implicatures, as well as their use as filled pauses or invariant tags. On the basis of these extensive pragmatic uses, it is suggested that interjections like a, e and o function as pragmatic particles having a prominent role in both conversation and its literary and filmic representation. More generally, it seems that the category of “interjection” covers a wide range of actual uses that are more akin to pragmatic particles (Beeching 2002), inserts (Biber et al. 1999) or interactives (Heine 2023), that is elements with a rich contribution to interactive discourse, both in non-scripted and scripted conversation. Corpora can be instrumental in evaluating this pragmatic import and its diachronic development.