Evans, Nicholas (1992). ‘Wanjh! Bonj! Nja!’: Sequential organization and social deixis in Mayali interjections. Journal of Pragmatics, 18(2/3), 225-244. DOI:10.1016/0378-2166(92)90053-E
This paper examines the semantics and pragmatics of a number of interjections in Mayali, a language of Arnhem Land, Australia. Definitions using Natural Semantic Metalanguage are used to make explicit the complex relations between the lexical meanings of interjections and their
interpretation in context. One class of interjections, which I call organizing interjections, play an important role in structuring discourse and in many cases constitute complete turns in conversational (and also in basically non-verbal) sequences. Their behaviour is explained by making explicit the presuppositions about discourse context, or ‘discourse placedness conditions’, that are part of their lexical meaning. Another two sets of interjections, the ‘Gesundheit set’ and the ‘sorry-for-the-swearing set’, exhibit highly specific presuppositions about social context, or ‘social placedness conditions’. Other interjections have a substantial degree of indirection, making inference necessary for their interpretation. To illustrate this, the interjection mah ‘time to do something!‘, whose agent is not semantically specified, is compared with others like nja ‘you take this now!’, whose agent is made explicit in the semantic representation. To cover cases like mah, it is useful to introduce a distinction between overt indirection, the lack of formally explicit coding of some aspect of meaning (e.g. argument or complement ellipsis), and covert indirection, the absence of some aspect of meaning from the semantic representation itself. All interjections, on this definition, are overtly indirect, but only some (such as mah) are in addition covertly indirect.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
