Türkiyat Mecmuası

Öz

Interjections occur outside of holistic grammatical structures and are more specific to spoken language. They function by conveying the speaker’s emotions, feelings, mental state, or attitude toward an event and can be positioned at various differentiating levels. Interjections are important tools in terms of imposing an emotional value rather than having a grammatical or semantic function or content in this respect and are among subjects that are generally left to the end in linguistic description studies. This is also due to the fact that interjections contain some issues that are not directly related to language and communication but rather to the meaningful contents that play an important role in realizing a discourse. Another reason is that they are mostly witnessed in spoken discourse and shaped around non-linguistic elements such as gestures. However, when evaluating interjections in the context of effectiveness and efficiency in discourse, they fulfill important functions often beyond language as elements that significantly increase the strength of expression and maintain or increase the level of interaction. The present study will exclude talking about interjections based on the classifications of grammatical elements, which are usually based on the distinction between meaning and function. Instead, the study will focus on primary (main) interjections in Turkish, which has been mostly ignored in relevant studies. These interjections have unspecific vocalic and lexical equivalents, as they are shaped outside the sound inventory of the language, unlike interjections such as eyvah, haydi, haydi, vah, vay, yazık, which can be partially or fully positioned within the language. The study will place emphasis on the interjection by presenting functions and examples of this interjection under various subheadings.