Interjections in Dutch: a corpus-based approach

Abstract

In this paper, the distribution of interjections over the clause is studied within the context of a topological framework. For this study authentic data were extracted from a corpus comprising one million words of written material and 174,000 words of spoken material. To explain this distribution we study the influence of the text type in which an interjection is found, the length of the interjection and its function. All three factors are shown to play a role. This confirms and amplifies hypotheses that hitherto had gone untested.