ITALIAN INTERJECTIONS BAH, BEH & BOH AND THEIR TRANSLATIONAL EQUIVALENTS IN SERBIAN

Abstract

Interjections are frequently used in everyday communication across nearly all languages (Zamora & Alessandro, 2015, p. 1). The role of interjections is embodied in conveying the speaker’s attitude, mental state, emotions, or other reactions in a communicative situation. Although relevant for linguistic analyses, it seems that this category of linguistic elements has not received adequate attention in linguistic studies, often being viewed as a separate and frequently isolated category of words. The idea of this paper is to examine the basic semantic-pragmatic aspects of the interjections bah, beh, and boh in the Italian language, as well as to identify their possible translational equivalents in the Serbian language. Therefore, the primary aim of this research is based on analysing the range of their pragmatic functions and demonstrating their role in context. In this regard, the secondary aim of this analysis pertains to examining the possible translational equivalents of the interjections in the Serbian language, and the issue of preserving these functions in translational solutions. The results of this analysis, conducted on examples extracted from a literary corpus, have illuminated numerous pragmatic functions of Italian interjections whose role is contextually conditioned. The heterogeneous nature of the translational equivalents in the selected corpus testifies to the fact that the translational solution is directly conditioned by the pragmatic function of the interjections and that this range of functions can be transferred through numerous equivalents in the target language.