Morphosyntactic features of interjections in German comic books

Magdalena Bednarczyk

Uniwersytet Jagielloński

Résumé

Interjections are units that occur mostly in spoken language. It has been claimed that these parts of speech are characteristic of text types whose function is to mimic speech, such as comic books. Having analysed selected German comic books, I discuss the morphological and syntactic features of interjections in this text type. I examine morphological phenomena: lengthening, doubling, and multiplication, as well as compositions of different subclasses of the investigated part of speech. Special focus in the analysis is placed on the Inflektive category, a term used in German linguistics, meaning bare verb stems, typical for comic books. Furthermore, I describe the syntactic features of interjections, considering their ability to function as independent utterances in comic books. In conclusion I demonstrate that certain subclasses of interjections are prone to form novel and independent expressions with other representatives of the analysed class, while other subclasses do not display such a tendency.

Mots-clés :

interjection, comic book, German language, Inflektive, morphology, syntax