Nick Enfield

Hurford on interjections

A quibble on interjections: I’ve just read Jim Hurford’s outstanding book ‘The Origins of Meaning’. In it, he discusses interjections, as the earliest precursors of linguistic utterances. (The book withholds all discussion of complex grammar; this will come in a sequel to the book.) The problem is that he says interjections ‘have no descriptive content’ and they are ‘not about anything’ other than the speaker’s internal state. But we know from work on these objects that they are informative about things in the world. Good cases, some listed by Hurford on p173 of the book, are Yuck!, Aha!, Phew!. These tell us something about the speaker, but also about what is happening around them. They are deceptively informative, and are more than mere equivalents to the ‘barks’ or ‘chutters’ of vervet monkeys. Then on p175, he states that interjections occupy a ‘very marginal status’ in modern languages. This just isn’t true, we use them constantly. Presumably what he means is that they don’t participate much in syntactic constructions. But functionally they carry a heavy load. See Paul Kockelman’s essay on interjections in Current Anthropology (2005), and special issue of Journal of Pragmatics (1990) on the topic, edited by Felix Ameka.

(The book is a bit frustrating, hard to assess without the ‘Part 2′ which really is just the second half of the book. It reminds me of Tarantino’s film Kill Bill, which was built as a single film but for commercial reasons was just chopped in half. I am writing a review of the book.)