Interjections and emotions: the case of 'gosh'

Abstract

Interjections in general can be considered linguistic expressions of emotions and attitudes, constituting complete and self-contained utterances. Though all languages are believed to have ‘emotive interjections’ (Wierzbicka 1999: 276), the literature on interjections and emotions has proved to be sparse, while studies on specific interjections are particularly uncommon. This study investigates the interjection 'gosh', which we propose to analyze as an expletive secondary interjection, originally used in the area of religion as a euphemistic replacement of ‘God’. The religious connection practically severed, 'gosh' can be revealed as non-stigmatised and, in general, positively-valued. It is clearly a mild expletive, with a wide range of emotive, cognitive and discourse-structure uses. By exploring components of the BNC and COCA corpora this chapter contributes to the study of 'gosh' in terms of further formal and functional features (position and syntactic peripheral behaviour, discourse role in conversation, dialogic character) together with possible differences between British and American English. Looking at the behaviour of 'gosh' in our data, we claim that it is an interjection that functions as a pragmatic marker in present-day English.