English 'oh' as a structural and modal marker: A contrastive analysis with Spanish

Abstract

Among interjections, a class often neglected in grammars, English 'oh' is one of the most highly frequent and multifunctional types, generally considered a discourse marker. The present contribution investigates this item, for a better understanding of its uses and meanings in interaction, and explores its equivalents in Spanish. As the corpus-based analysis reveals, 'oh' mostly occurs in the modal and textual-structural domains, and among the specific functions found in these, special attention is devoted to the role of 'oh' to demarcate structural ties between discourse units. It is argued that English 'oh' should be considered in the literature within the set of markers of topic shift and topic boundaries, and its knowledge expanded beyond the expression of affective and epistemic meanings.