A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of The English Interjection Huh

Interjections are words that express emotions,replies or calls.Research on interjections is relatively peripheral in the field of linguistics due to the characteristics of the interjections themselves.In some studies,interjections are considered paralinguistic and independent in linguistic analysis.Nevertheless,there are experts who have long devoted themselves to the study on interjections.The number of the research is also increasing recently.Although it has been mentioned that modality,subjectivity and intersubjectivity can be realized by interjections in communication in some studies,this point has not been fully expounded and exemplified.Meanwhile,theories in cognitive studies are still in need of application.In this study,the English interjection huh is selected as the case to demonstrate its pragmatic functions and the motivations behind.The research questions of this study are:（1）What are the pragmatic functions of the English interjection huh?（2）What are the motivations behind the pragmatic functions of huh?The connections between the pragmatic functions and the motivations behind are revealed via the corpus-driven approach.The procedures are as follows.First,after the review of previous studies abroad and at home,the English interjection huh is selected as the case on account of that.Then,all instances of huh with their“Context+” from the British National Corpus,except for the unrelated search results,are analyzed and classified in terms of their pragmatic functions and positions.At last,based on the findings from the corpus,the motivations behind the pragmatic functions of huh are elaborated.The following conclusions are drawn: 1)When the English interjection huh is used at the left periphery or used alone in one turn,the pragmatic functions such as“emotion expression”,“attitude manifestation” and “epistemic reply” tend to be realized.They can be represented as “the speaker is in a certain state”.2)When huh is used at the right periphery,pragmatic functions such as “request for followership”,“informance of understanding”,“call for agreement or admission”,“demand for reply”,“information provider”,and “reassurer” tend to be realized.They can be summarized as “the speaker is expecting the hearer to do in a certain way or be in a certain state”.3)The motivations behind the former pragmatic functions include subjectivity in social cognition,attention in “socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics”,and the epistemological issue in neuro-economics;the motivations behind the latter include intersubjectivity,intention and the motivational issue.Besides,doubt/belief model and modality also serve to explain the use of huh.In this thesis,theories such as subjectivity and intersubjectivity in cognitive studies are used to explicate the authentic use of the English interjection huh.At the same time,the examples elicited from the corpus are used to attest to the concepts in cognitive studies.The combination in this research is thus helpful for both theoretical development and practical application in the field of linguistics and cognitive studies.