Borrowings - A Source of Innovation in the Class of Interjections

The present article is part of a larger project investigating the various types of linguistic change that affected and might affect the word class traditionally known under the label of interjection. The results of our research, as outlined here, concern the inter-linguistic mobility of units, i.e., borrowings, which in the source language can be (but not necessarily) interjections, and which are still categorized - or recategorized - as interjections in the target language. The inventory of interjections which constituted the corpus of the present study is therefore collected mainly from normative sources - dictionaries and grammars - which encompass several Romance and Germanic languages: Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. (Less)