Linguistics and Interjections Essay Example for Free

linguistics and Interjections EssayIn Hesperian philosophy and linguistic theory, interventionsthat is, words identical oof, ouch, and bleah substantiate traditionally been understood to indicate feelingal relegates. This oblige offers an account state custodyt of interjections in Qeqchi Maya that illuminates their social and wandering(a) influences. In extra, it establishes the grammatical produce of interjections, both in Qeqchi and crosswise spoken languages, and characterizes the superpowerical ends and pragmatic functions of interjections in Qeqchi in hurt of a semiotic framework that may be generalized for oppositewise languages. With these grammatical forms, listical determinations, and pragmatic functions in hand, it details the various social and winding ends that interjections serve in nonp atomic number 18il Qeqchi community, thereby shedding light on local values, norms, ontological classes, and social relations. In short, this clause argues a gainst interpretations of interjections that focus on native emotional states by providing an account of their meanings in damage of situational, discursive, and social circumstance.p a u l k o c k e l m a n is McKennan Post-Doctoral Fellow in Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Dartm disc everywhereh College (Han all over, N. H. 03755, U. S. A. paul. emailprotected edu). Born in 1970, he was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (B. A. , 1992) and the University of bread (M. S. , 1994 Ph. D. , 2002).His publications include The Collection of Copal among the Qeqchi-Maya (Research in sparing Anthropology 2016394), Factive and Counterfactive Clitics in Qeqchi-Maya Stance, Status, and Subjectivity, in Papers from the Thirty-eighth Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (Chicago Linguistics Society, in press), and The Interclausal Relations Hierarchy in Qeqchi Maya (International Journal of Ameri send away Linguistics 6925 48). The reconcile paper was submitted 1 vi 01 and accepted 27 xii 02.1. A longish version of this article was presented at the workshop Semiotics Culture in Context at the University of Chicago in January 2001. Chris Ball, Anya Bernstein, John Lucy, and Michael Silverstein all deliverd very helpful commentary. This article excessively greatly bene? ted from suggestions made by Benjamin S. Orlove and several anonymous referees. Western philosophy and linguistic theory have traditionally considered interjections at the periphery of language and primordially thinkd to emotion.For example, the Latin grammarian Priscian de? ned interjections as a part of speech houseifying an emotion by center of an unformed word (Padley 1976266). Muller (1862) ? thought that interjections were at the limit of what might be phoneed language. Sapir (192167) said that they were the ne argonst of all language sounds to instinctive utterance. Bloom? eld (19841933177) said that they draw under a vi olent stimulus, and Jakobson (1960 354) considered them exemplars of the purely emotive stratum of language. While interjections be no yearlong considered peripheral to linguistics and are now carefully de? ned with respect to their grammatical form, their meanings remain vague and elusive. In particular, although interjections are no longer characterized purely in legal injury of emotion, they are still characterized in terms of intellectual states. For example, Wierzbicka (1992164) characterizes interjections as referring to the speaker units current mental state or mental act. Ameka (1992a107) says that from a pragmatic point of view, interjections may be de?ned as a subset of items that encode speaker attitudes and communicative intentions and are considerationbound, and Montes (19991289) nones that some(prenominal) interjections focus on the internal reaction of affectedness of the speaker with respect to the referent. Philosophers have offered similar interpretations. For example, herder thought that interjections were the human equivalent of animal sounds, being both a language of feeling and a law of nature (196688), and Rousseau, pursuing the origins of language, theorized that protolanguage was ideally interjectional (199071).Indeed, much(prenominal) philosophers have posited a historic transition from interjections to language in which the latter allows us not unaccompanied to index pain and express passion scarcely also to denote values and exercise reason (DAtri 1995). 2 Thus interjections have been understood as a semiotic artifact of our natural origins and the nigh transparent index of our emotions. Such an understanding of interjections is late rooted in Western thought. Aristotle (1984), for example, posited a contrastive blood betwixt voice, proper only to universe as instantiated in language, and sound, shared by humans and animals as instantiated in cries.This contrastive relation was thence compared with other analog ous contrastive relations, in particular, value and pleasure/pain, polis and rest homehold, and bios (the good flavor, or political life proper to humans) and zoe (pure life, shared by all living things). Such a contrast is so permeant that modern philosophers such as Agamben (1995) have devoted much of their scholarly work to the thinking out of this tradition and others built on it such as id versus ego in the Freudian paradigm. In short, the kinfolk distinction made amid interjections and language 2.DAtri (1995124) argues that, for Rousseau, interjections . . . are sounds and not voices they are passive registerings and as such do not presuppose the intervention of allow, which is what characterizes human acts of speech. 467 468 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, turn 4, AugustOctober 2003 proper maps onto a big set of distinctions in Western thought emotion and cognition, animality and humanity, nature and culture, female and male, passion and reason, cru de(a) life and the good life, pain and value, private and public, and so on (see, e.g. , Lutz 1988, Strathern 1988).In this article I subjugate such abstracting and dichotomizing traps by going straight to the heart of interjections their everyday habit in actual intercourse when seen in the context of local culture and grounded in a semiotic framework. I lead off by characterizing the linguistic and ethnographic context in which I carried out my research and go on to relate interjections to other linguistic forms, showing how they are both similar to and distinct from other classes of words in natural languages.Next I provide and exemplify a semiotic framework, generalizable crossways languages, in terms of which the indexical objects and pragmatic functions of interjections can best be characterized. Then I detail the local customs duty of the 12 most commonly utilize interjections in Qeqchi and show the way in which they are trussed into all things cultural values, norms , ontological classes, social relations, and so on. I conclude by discussing the relative absolute frequency with which the various forms and functions of interjections are apply.In short, I argue against interpretations of interjections that focus on emotional states by providing an account of their meanings in terms of situational, discursive, and social context. Linguistic and Ethnographic Context While I am attempting to provide as wide a theoretical account of interjections as I can, thereby providing a metalanguage for harangue about similar pledge phenomena in other languages, I am also trying to conquer the grammatical niceties of Qeqchi Maya and the discursive and social particularities of one Qeqchi-speaking closure in particular.Before I begin my analysis, then, I want to sketch the linguistic and ethnographic context in which I worked. Qeqchi is a language in the Kichean branch of the Mayan family, spoken by some 360,000 speakers in Guatemala (in the departments of Alta Verapaz, Izabel, and Peten) and Belize (Kaufman 1974, Stewarfaret 1980). 3 Lin? guistically, Qeqchi is relatively well described scholars such as Berinstein (1985), Sedat (1955), Stewart (1980), Stoll (1896), and Chen Cao et al.(1997) have discussed its syntax, morphology, phonology, and lexicon, and I have detailed various morphosyntactic forms (encoding grammatical categories such as mood, status, evidentiality, taxis, and inalienable possession) as they intersect with sociocultural values and contextual features and as they illuminate local modes of personhood (Kockelman 3. Typologically, Qeqchi is a morphologically ergative, head-marking language. In Qeqchi, vowel length (signaled by doubling letters) is phonemic /k/ and /q/ are velar and uvular plosives, respectively, and /x/ and /j/ are palato-alveolar and velar fricatives, respectively.All other phonemes have their standard IPA values. 2002, 2003a, b). This article is therefore part of a larger meet in which I examine how intentional and evaluative stances are encoded in natural languages and the relations that such stances bear to local modes of subjectivity.Alta Verapaz, the original c memorialise of the Qeqchi-speaking muckle who still make up the absolute majority of its population, has had a unusual hi apologue even by Guatemalan standards. In 1537, after the Spanish crown had failed to conquer the indigenous peoples living there, the Dominican Friar Bartolome de Las Casas was permitted to ? patch up the area through religious methods.Having succeeded, he changed the name of the area from Tezulutlan (Land of War) to Verapaz (True Peace), and the Dominicans were granted full control over the areathe state banning secular immigration, removing all military colonies, and nullifying front land grants. In this way, for intimately 300 geezerhood the area remained an isolated enclave, relatively protected by the paternalism of the church in simile with other parts of Guatemala (King 1974, S apper 1985).This ended abruptly in the late 1800s, however, with the advent of coffee growing, liberal reforms, and the in? ux of Europeans (Cambranes 1985, Wagner 1996). Divested of their land and forced to work on coffee plantations, the Qeqchi began migrating north into the unpopulated lowland forests of the Peten ? and Belize (Adams 1965, Carter 1969, Howard 1975, Kockelman 1999, Pedroni 1991, Saa Vidal 1979, Schwartz 1990, Wilk 1991). In the past 40 years this migration has been fueled by a civil war that has ravaged the Guatemalan countryside, with the Qeqchi ?eeing not just scarce resources and labor quotas only also their own nations soldiers much forcibly conscripted speakers of other Mayan languages (Carmack 1988, IWGIA 1978, Wilson 1995). As a consequence, the past century has seen the Qeqchi population spread from Alta Verapaz to the Peten and ? nally to Belize, Mexico, and even the ? United States. Indeed, although only the fourth largest of some 24 Mayan languages, Q eqchi is thought to have the largest percentage of monolinguals, and the ethnic group is Guatemalas fastest-growing and most geographically extensive (Kaufman 1974, Stewart 1980).The devil key ethnographies of Qeqchi-speakers have been written by Wilk (1991) and Wilson (1995), the former treating household bionomics in Belize and the latter upheavals in village life and identity at the height of the civil war in highland Guatemala during the 1980s. In addition to these monographs, there are also a number of dissertations and articles on the history (King 1974, Sapper 1985, Wagner 1996), ecology (Carter 1969, Secaira 1992, Wilson 1972), and migration (Adams 1965, Howard 1975, Pedroni 1991) of Qeqchi-speakingpeople.The data for this article are based on almost dickens years of ethnographic and linguistic ? eldwork among speakers of Qeqchi, most of it in Chinahab, a village of some 80 families (around 650 people) in the municipality of San Juan Chamelco, in the department of Alta Ver apaz. At an altitude of approximately 2,400 m, Chinahab is one of the highest villages in this area, with an annual precipitation of more than 2,000 mm.It is also one of k o c k e l m a n The Meanings of Interjections in Qeqchi Maya F 469the most remote, access to the closest road requiring a three-hour hike down a steep and muddy single-track trail. Its relatively high altitude and remote location provide the perfect scope for cloud forest, and such a cloud forest provides the perfect setting for the resplendent quetzal, being star sign to what is thought to be the highest density of such birds in the world.Because of the existence of the quetzal and the cloud forest in which it makes its home, Chinahab has been the site of a successful eco-tourism project the conditions and consequences of which are detailed in my dissertation (Kockelman 2002).While the majority of villagers in Chinahab are monolingual speakers of Qeqchi, some men who have served time in the army or worked as it inerant traders speak some Spanish. All the villagers are Catholic. Chinahab is divided by a visual modality peak with dwellings on both of its sides and in the surrounding valleys. It takes about 45 minutes to hike across the village. At one end there is a biological station kept by the eco-tourism project and use sporadically by European ecologists, and at the other there is a Catholic church and a cemetery.In the center there is a small store, a school for primary and subsidiary grades, and a soccer ? eld. The surrounding landscape is cloud forest giving way to scattered house sites, agricultural parcels, pasture, and ? elds now fallow. All villagers engage in corn-based, or milpa, agriculture, but very few have enough land to ful? ll all of their subsistence needs. 4 For this reason, m each women in the village are dedicated to volaille husbandry, most men in the village engage in seasonal labor on plantations (up to ?ve months a year in some nerves), and many families engag e in itinerant trade (women weaving baskets and textiles for the men to sell) and eco-tourism (the women hosting tourists and the men guiding them).Dwelling sites often contain a scattering of houses in which reside an aged couple and their married sons, all of whom share a water source and a pasture. The individual families themselves often have two houses, a relatively traditional thatched-roof house in which the family cooks and sleeps and a relatively brisk house with a tin roof in which they host festivals and in which older children and ecotourists may sleep.Because of eco-tourism and the in? ux of money and strangers that it brings, there has been an increase in the construction of such tin-roofed houses, and, as will be seen, many of my examples of interjections come from such construction contexts. My data on the use of interjections among villagers in Chinahab comes from 14 months of ? eldwork carried out between 1998 and 2001. The data collection con4. Before 1968, what is now Chinahab was owned by the owner of a plantation.Qeqchi-speakers who lived in the village of Popobaj (located to the south of and lower than Chinahab) were permitted to make their milpa in this area in exchange for two weeks of labor per month on the ? nca (Secaira 199220). Only in 1968, when a group of villagers got together to form a land learnedness committee, were some 15 caballer? as (678 ha) of land purchased from the owner ? for 4,200 quetzals (US$4,200).This land, objet dart legally owned by the entire community, was divided among the original 33 villagers as a function of their original contributions.sisted in part of characterizing tokens of manipulation when I heard them and in part of tracking tokens of usage through recordings of naturally occurring conversations.5 In particular, given the fact that many interjections occur in relatively nonconversational, task-engaged situations (house building, planting, playing, cooking, etc. ), trying to record them in such contexts was futile. Luckily, as will be seen, they often occur in modes of disruption (when some purposeful action goes awry), which makes them relatively tripping to notice in real-time context and their contextual regularities relatively easy to stipulate.In addition, I tape-recorded naturally occurring conversations in the households of three families once a week over several months, usually at dinnertime. 6 After I describe the forms and meanings of the interjections I will discuss the relative frequency of the various tokens collected and thereby illuminate which forms and meanings are most often used by whom. The Grammatical Form of Interjections There are four criteria by which interjections may be distinguish from other linguistic forms within a particular language and generalized as a form class across languages (Ameka 1992, Bloom?eld 19841933, Jespersen 1965, Wilkins 1992).First, all interjections are conventional lexical forms, or words, that can constitute utterances on their own (Wilkins 1992). They are conventional in that their sign carriers have relatively alike(p) and supreme phonological forms, and they can constitute utterances on their own because their only syntagmatic relation with other linguistic forms is parataxisin which two forms are united by the use of only one condemn pitch (Bloom? eld 19841933171).They can therefore stand alone as perfectly sensible stretches of lambaste ahead and after which there is silence. Second, with few exceptions, no interjection is simultaneously a member of another(prenominal) word class (Ameka 1992a, Wilkins 1992). Almost all of them are what Ameka (1992a105), following Bloom? eld (19841933), calls primary interjections picayune words or non-words which . . . can constitute an utterance by themselves and do not practicely enter into constructions with other word classes. In Qeqchi, the main exceptions are interjections built, through lexical extension, from the primary interjection ay.In th e case of ay dios, the additional 5. I also include several examples of interjection usage that occurred in the context of ethnographic interviews about topics other than interjections, for these often indicated that an ethnographic question was poorly posed or out or keeping(p) in the local context. I also carried out extensive interviews about the meanings of interjections with native speakers (see Kockelman 2002 for an extended raillery of the relationship between form, usage, and speakers re? ections).6.Indeed, the best two accounts of interjection-like things rejoinder cries in Goffman (1978) and emblematic gestures in Sherzer (1993)explicitly take into account social interaction and ethnographic description. Good accounts of the discursive use of interjections are offered by De Bruyn (1998), Ehlich (1986), Gardner (1998), and Meng and Schrabback (1999). 470 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 4, AugustOctober 2003 element, dios, is a bring noun from Spa nish, meaning god. In the case of ay dios atinyuwa, besides the Spanish loanword there is a Qeqchi expression, at-in-yuwa (you are my father).Interjections of this latter kind, which are or involve forms that belong to other word classes, will be called secondary interjections (again following Ameka and Bloom? eld). Similarly, the English secondary interjections damn and heavens may be used as both interjections and verbs or nouns. Third, with few exceptions, an interjection consists of a single morpheme and undergoes neither in? ectional nor ancestryal processes (Wilkins 1992). Interjections cannot be in? ectionally marked for grammatical categories such as tense or number, and they cannot be move on derived into another form class such as noun or verb.Such forms are often classi? ed as a subclass of particles or discourse markers (see Ameka 1992a, Fraser 1999, Jespersen 1965, Schiffrin 1987, Wilkins 1992, and Zwicky 1985). In Qeqchi there are three exceptions to this characteri zation. First, uyaluy is what I will call a reduplicative interjection, being composed, through syllabic reduplication, from the interjection uy. Second, ay dios and ay dios atinyuwa are what I will call extended interjections, being composed, through lexical extension, from the interjection ay.And lastly, the interjection ay may undergo further derivation into a delocutionary verb (becoming ayaynak, to cry or yell continually, often said of dogs howling), which may then undergo normal verbal in? ection for grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, person, and number. Lastly, although it is not a criterial feature, many of these forms are phonologically or morphologically anomalous, having features which mark them as odd or unique relative to the standard lexical forms of a language.For example, unlike most Qeqchi words, in which stress falls on the last syllable (Stewart 1980), the interjection uyaluy has syllable-initial stress. Similarly, while reduplication is a common morph ological process in Qeqchi (Stewart 1980), the reduplicative interjection uyaluy is derived through a nonstandard morphological form. While many Qeqchi words involve a glottalized alveolar stop, the interjection t is also implosive.7 Whereas the Spanish loanword dios is usually phonetically assimilated in Qeqchi as tiox when used as a noun, in the interjection ay dios there is no devoicing of the initial consonant of this noun (i.e. , /d/ does not become /t/) or palatization of its ? nal consonant (i. e. , /s/ does not become /x/). And the interjection sht differs from ordinary Qeqchi words in using /sh/, rather than a vowel, as a syllabic (see Bloom? eld 19841933121).In short, it is lead from the number of quali? cations that interjections, like most linguistic forms, are dif? cult to characterize with necessary and suf? cient conditions (see Taylor 1995, Zwicky 1985). Nevertheless, they may simultaneously be differentiated from other form classes within a particular language and generalized as a form class across languages.7. Often called a dental click (Wilkins 1992) or a suction stop (Jespersen 196590). Readers who speak some Spanish may have noticed that many Qeqchi interjections looking similar to Spanish interjectionsay (dios), uy, ah, eh, shtand even to English interjections (sht and t). While I have no historical data that would attest to such a claim, given the history of sustained linguistic contact between speakers of Spanish and Qeqchi via the colonial encounter and between speakers of Spanish and English this should come as no surprise.The one good account of interjections in Spanish (Montes 1999) discusses only a small range of the discursive functions of interjections and focuses on the internal state of the speaker. As I will show, however, the meanings of some of these interjections in Qeqchi seem to bear a resemblance to their meanings in Spanish, as far as can be discerned from the comparative data. In this way, these loan interjections s how that almost any linguistic form may be borrowed (see Brody 1995) with some maintenance of its meaning.The Meanings of Qeqchi InterjectionsAlthough interjections are relatively easy to characterize from the standpoint of grammatical form, there is no framework in terms of which one may order and compare their meaningsthat is, the classes of objects and signs that they index (and thereby stand in a relationship of contiguity with) and the types of pragmatic functions they serve (and thereby may be used as a means to achieve). In what follows, I frame their use in terms of situational, discursive, and social context. I will begin with an extended example through which the framework will become clear.The Qeqchi interjection chix indexes loathsome objects in the situational context. For example, when take up his bowl of food from the ground, a man notices that he has set it in chicken feces. Chix, he says, scraping the bowl on the dirt to wipe off the feces. His wife, herself respo nsible for the chicken, then takes his bowl for herself and gives him a new one. Similarly, when opening the door to her house early one morning, a woman notices that the dog has vomited regenerate outside the doorway. Chix, she says, and her ? ve-year-old son comes over to look.She tells him to scrape it away with a machete. Like most interjections that have indexical objects in the situational context, this interjection serves to call anothers attention to the object. 8 Relatedly, and as a function of responsibility assessment (husband 1 wife 1 child), it directs anothers attention to what must be cleaned up, avoided, etc. The interjection chix may also be transposed to index a sign denoting or characterizing a loathsome object (see Buhler 1990). In such cases of sign-based transposition, ? the interjection is in a relationship of contiguity with a 8.Montes (19991293) notes that most of the Spanish interjections she examined seem to be associated with seeing. We ? nd that a large number of the interjections ah, oh, uh, ay, oy, uy used in the conversations examined co-occur with directives to see or look at or as a response to these directives. k o c k e l m a n The Meanings of Interjections in Qeqchi Maya F 471 sign that denotes or characterizes the object or event in question (rather than being in contiguity with the actual object or event, as in the usage of chix just discussed).In other words, it is as if the speaker were inhabiting the frame of the narrated event (Buhler 1990). In this way, ? the interjection chix indexes not just loathsomeness but also signs that refer to or predicate qualities of loathsome objects. Insofar as the denotatum of such a sign has the same qualities and values as the object itself, the modality of contiguity (being able to taste, touch, see, or smell the object in question) is suspended while the ontological class of the object (loathsomeness) is maintained.For example, in telling a story to a group ofmen about a friend wh o was bitten by a poisonous roamer while working on a plantation in the lowland area of Guatemala, the speaker describes the sanies blisters that rose up on his friends arm. Chix, says one of the men listening.The other men laugh, and before continuing his story the speaker adds that the pus blisters took two weeks to heal. Like most interjections that undergo signbased transposition, such usage often serves as a backchannel cue, indicating that the speaker is listening but cannot or does not want to wreak to the topic at hand (Brown and Yule 19839094 Duncan 1973 compare the usage of mmm or jeez in English).Lastly, the interjection chix may be transposed to index an addressees relation of contiguity with a loathsome object. In such cases of addressee-based transposition, the situational indexical object is transposed to a person other than the speaker. The speakers sign is audible (a relation of contiguity) to the addressee, who is in a relationship of contiguity with the object. In other words, it is as if the speaker were inhabiting the ad? dressees current corporal?eld (see Buhler 1990, Hanks 1990), and, again, the modality of contiguity is suspended while the ontological class is maintained.For example, a mother watching her three-year-old son approach a dog that is defecating wormy tummy calls out to him Chix. The child stops his advance and watches from a distance. In this most addressee-focused way, the sign is used by a parent to index that a child is within reach (typically tactile) of a disgusting object and serves as an imperative not to touch the object.Interjections are primarily indexical (see Peirce 1955) in that they stand for their objects by a relationship of contiguity rather than by a relationship of convention (as in the case of symbols) or similarity (as in the case of icons). 9 Although the indexical modality of interjections is emphasized in this article, the exemplary modality is always present in at least two interrelated ways. First, and trivially, the interjection itself has a standard9. If interjections were iconic, then they would be expected to resemble their objects.The problem with this, as exempli?ed by Kryk-Kastovskys (1997) argument that interjections are the most iconic of all linguistic elements expressing surprise, is that one needs to know what surprise looks like when usually our only indication of surprise is the interjection or behavior itself. However, interjections as indexical of situational and discursive objects do in certain(p) cases have iconic modalities of meaning (see, e. g. , the discussion of ay, ay dios, and ay dios atinyuwa below). ized but relatively arbitrary form that is conventionally used by members of a given linguistic community.Second, interjections conventionally stand in a relation of contiguity with particular classes of objects. These conventional classes of indexical objects are present in two ways. First, across interjections, one may characterize what semiotic class of objects is being indexed. Second, in the case of any particular interjection, one may characterize what ontological class of objects is being indexed. Besides indexing objects or signs in the immediate context, interjections have pragmatic functions they serve as a means to achieve certain ends.For example, chix variously serves as an attentative (when nontransposed), a back-channel cue (when undergoing sign-based transposition), and an imperative (when undergoing addressee-based transposition). Both the objects indexed and the pragmatic functions served (see Silverstein 1987) are full aspects of the meanings of interjections. Finally, interjections may index more than one object at once. In particular, they may index objects, signs, internal states, and social relations. In what follows, I will refer to these distinct types of indexical objects as situational, discursive, expressive, and social, respectively.Situational indexical objects are the objects or events in the immediate context of the speech event. Discursive indexical objects are the signs that occur in the speech event. 10 Together, situational and discursive indexical objects are the most stable co-occurrence regularities that interjections possess and therefore the only ones that are easy to tabulate. Expressive indexical objects are the intentional stances of the speakerthe putative mental states, whether construed as cognitive or emotive.11 Lastly, social indexical objects are the various social roles dwell by the speaker or addressee (gender, ethnicity, age, etc. ) or the social relations that exist between the two (status, deference, politeness, etc. ). For example, chix may index not only a loathsome object in the situational context but a social relation (parentchild, husband-wife, raconteurappreciative listener) and, in many cases, an internal state (disgust). And the interjection ay not only indexes a painful object in the situational context or an unexpected answer in the di s10.This is not quite the standard distinction between text and context (Montes 1999 and Wilkins 1992). For example, while it is tempting to put sign-based transposition into the discursive context for the purposes of schematizing the data, sign-based transpositions make hotshot only in terms of the qualities of the objects referred to by the sign indexed by the interjection. In contrast, an unsolicited response such as a dubitive is directed at the truth of anothers assertion rather than at any particular quality of the state of affairs predicated by that assertion.For this reason, dubitives belong to the discursive context and sign-based transpositions to the situational context. 11. Whereas interjections creatively index expressive indexical objects in that the interjection is often the only sign of the internal state in question, they presupposedly index situational and discursive indexical objects in that both interjection and indexical object are simultaneously present in con text (see Silverstein 1976 for this distinction).This difference in semiotic status (presupposing/creative) maps onto a putative difference in ontological status (world/mind). 472 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 4, AugustOctober 2003 cursive context but also an internal state (pain) in the expressive context and a role in the social context (in particular, female gender). Many interjections index signs in the discursive context in that they co-occur with (or serve as) a response to an addressees previous utterance or a nonresponse.In the case of a response, the use of an interjection occurs after and makes sense only relative to the addressees previous utterance. For example, the interjection ih indexes an addressees previous statement and serves as a registerative, indicating that the speaker has heard and understood the statement. In the case of a nonresponse, the interjection may either call forth an addressees utterance (and thereby occur before it) or occur in the midst of the speaker.