De Interjectie als Illocutionaire Handeling

The purpose of this paper is to give an answer to the question if an illocutionary act can be performed with an interjection. Therefore a method of analysis was designed which consists of four elements viz.: determining the communicative function, defining the semantic content, recovering the propositional content and classifying the interjections in the taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Interjections taken from everyday conversations were analysed and the results show that with every interjection uttered, an illoctionary act was performed. These results contradict the commonly held view that interjections are not real words, but merely sounds to give expression to our feelings.