Particularidades fonológicas das interjeições primárias do português europeu: ah, afinal são palavras como as outras

Abstract

In the long tradition of Western grammars, interjections have been treated in a rather peculiar way. Sometimes completely ignoring these units, sometimes dwelling on different kinds of  particularities so as not to consider them linguistic forms in their own right or to relegate them to a very secondary plane, many grammatical descriptions (of Portuguese and other languages) generally give them no or marginal attention. This attitude contrasts with some linguistic investigations that try to re-inscribe interjections in the set of units that can be described grammatically. In most studies that focus on interjections, there is a considerable insistence on phonological and other idiosyncrasies that seem to contribute to the highly irregular character of interjections. In this study, making a preliminary phonological analysis of a limited set of primary interjections of European Portuguese, it is found that the cases of true phonological irregularity of these words are a minority and that many of the apparent formal exceptions found in the interjections of this language are shared by other lexical subsets of Portuguese. We thus argue that concepts such as lexical strata or sublexica can provide arguments to integrate interjections into the phonological description of Portuguese as a subset of particular but not totally irregular forms.