The Interjection 'Aiyo' in Taiwan Mandarin

台灣華語中的感嘆詞「哎喲」

語言學界研究感嘆詞有兩個主要的研究方向，其中之一是以語意學理論為基礎，另一個則是根據社會語言學的理論。本文主旨是藉由研究台灣華語的感嘆詞「哎喲」來呈現上述兩種研究法的互補關係。本研究的資料蒐集自『中央研究院現代漢語平衡語料庫』，我們分析了其中包含有「哎喲」的例句，並整理成十一種型式的用法。這幾種型式又可以分成以下五個大項：(1)表示否定立場；(2)表示肯定立場；(3)緩和個人立場帶來的效應；(4)表示嘲諷；(5)引起談話者注意。這五個大項符合了華俄屯(Wharton)在2003年所提出的高層次顯義(higher-level explicature)，因為「唉呦」可以在語句的一開頭就提示聽話者，指出一個語意的方向，讓說話者和聽話者藉由語意表達和理解上的呼應達到語言社會上的功效。本文的假設從研究結果中獲得證實。

There are two prominent approaches to interjections, one is based on semantic theory and the other is informed by sociolinguistics. This study focuses on the Taiwan Mandarin interjection aiyo and attempts to show how both these two approaches are workable when conducting research on interjections. The data used was collected from the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. We analyze 67 examples, presenting 11 types of interjectory use of aiyo. They are categorized into 5 main categories: (1) for example, showing negative proposition, (2) showing positive proposition, (3) mitigating the proposition, (4) mocking the proposition, and (5) functioning as an attention getter. These five categories give sense to what Wharton (2003) proposed as “higher-level explicature”, by pointing in the general direction in which relevance should be sought, together with the context, the speakers and the hearers know exactly the meaning of the utterance. Our hypothesis appears confirmed by the results.