As interjeições do português brasileiro e seus aspectos indexicais

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese interjections form a heterogeneous and productive grammatical class, whose items are commonly associated with the idea that they “express feelings and emotions of the speaker”, but in fact these items have other functions and meanings in different speech contexts. Our research hypothesis considers that (i) interjections are syntactically independent, that (ii) they carry an elided/unpronounced indexical element in their structure, and that (iii) they have expressive content. We will present a set of interjections to which classification criteria will be applied according to the contextual information of the speech episode and their functionality. The scope of the present research also includes the expressive semantic content of the interjections; since these items can not be evaluated according to their truth conditions, because, following our analysis, they contribute only in the expressive dimension, and therefore we will explore the multidimensionality theory of Gutzmann (2013; 2015), which provides a formal apparatus for dealing with expressive items. Our tools of analysis are formal semantics and pragmatics, and we apply a hypothetical deductive methodology, we will formulate our conclusions in order to be falsifiable and therefore verifiable, counting on the speaker’s intuition.