Interjecties

Interjecties, the Dutch term for interjections, are a word class used to express emotion, reaction, or attitude without forming part of the main syntactic structure of a sentence. They can stand alone as utterances or appear within a sentence, and are typically marked by punctuation such as exclamation points or commas.

Interjections serve a variety of functions in discourse. They convey emotional reactions (surprise, joy, anger, pain), social stance (greeting, apology, attention-getting), or pragmatic cues (hesitation, agreement, consolation). In speech, prosody—tone, pitch, and rhythm—plays a central role, while in writing punctuation signals the intended force of the utterance.

Interjections come in several forms. Lexical items such as wow, oh, alas, hey, and phew express clear meanings or affect. Onomatopoeic sounds like ouch, oops, eek, and buzz convey sensory or emotional states. Nonlexical hesitations such as uh and um function as discourse fillers. Interjections can be language-specific or borrowed from other languages, and they may range from highly casual to socially marked.

Syntactically, interjections are typically independent, not inflected, and do not require agreement with a subject or tense. They can appear at sentence boundaries or parenthetically within a sentence and are often separated by commas or exclamation marks. In written text, capitalization and punctuation reinforce their emphatic or emotional force.

Cross-linguistic variation is common: languages differ in the size of their interjection inventories, the phonetic patterns they favor, and how interjections interact with surrounding syntax. Nevertheless, interjecties share the core function of signaling affect and stance in discourse. See also interjection, exclamation, onomatopoeia.