(Meta)pragmatic functions of emotive interjections in early childhood

Abstract

The present paper deals with the study of primary emotive interjections in early childhood. We have analyzed data that belong to Koiné Child Language Corpus. The research shows that interjections –particles which are considered as periphery within the linguistic system- play a key role in the pragmatic development of children since their uses link the preverbal with the verbal stage. Our results demonstrate the quantitative importance of these particles in early childhood. For its part, the pragmatic analysis has proved that, on the one hand, interjections constitute proto-expressive speech acts with deictic function and, on the other, new metapragmatic functions appear successively connected to indexicality.