Chapter 13. English oh as a structural and modal marker

Abstract

Among interjections, a class often neglected in grammars, English oh is one of the most highly frequent and multifunctional types, generally considered a discourse marker. The present contribution investigates this item, for a better understanding of its uses and meanings in interaction, and explores its equivalents in Spanish. As the corpus-based analysis reveals, oh mostly occurs in the modal and textual-structural domains, and among the specific functions found in these, special attention is devoted to the role of oh to demarcate structural ties between discourse units. It is argued that English oh should be considered in the literature within the set of markers of topic shift and topic boundaries, and its knowledge expanded beyond the expression of affective and epistemic meanings.