Interjections and the Language Functions Debate

Five views of the function of interjections, developed in the first half of the 20th century by the psychologist-linguist Bühler, the linguists Gardiner, and Jakobson, and the psychologists Révész and Duijker, are discussed. All five scholars reject the earlier psychologism that reinforced the traditional emotion-expressive view of interjections; all of them argue for a listener-directed, communicative view of language in general, and all include a specific appeal-to-the-listener-function in their model of language functions. My original hypothesis was therefore that these scholars would reject the one-sided traditional view that interjections mainly express the speaker’s emotions, acknowledging instead that the central function of most interjections is to make some appeal to the listener (a view supported by recent investigation of a corpus of spoken Dutch, which shows that only 7% fulfils a purely expressive function). As it turns out, however, all five scholars support the traditional view and attributed an expressive function to interjections. In this paper I try to explain this unexpected result

Needy or Greedy? The Social Psychology of Individuals Who Fraudulently Claim Unemployment Benefits

This study explored the relationships between diverse social psychological and economic variables and self‐reported and officially documented unemployment benefit fraud. Two groups receiving unemployment benefit were studied; a fraudulent group of 45 individuals and an honest group of 51 individuals. Interview measures of financial strain, social norms, opportunity for fraud, social controls, personal strain, personal orientation, perceived risk of punishment, and intolerance of fraud were obtained. The results of univariate and regression analyses revealed that although financial strain and social norms did not differ between the two groups, the fraudulent group had more opportunity, were less well educated, were more alienated and inclined to take risks, and had more positive attitudes toward a variety of kinds of fraud. Copyrigh

Het voltooid deelwoord in het Nederlands: beperkingen op het attributief gebruik

According to current insights, attributive use of the past participle (APP) is impossible only with immutative intransitive verbs. Yet there appear to be APP restrictions with transitive and mutative intransitive verbs, but these restrictions are less absolute.In APPs constructions, the attributive relationship implies that a PP, which presents the verbal meaning as a patient situation, forms a category together with a noun. In contrast with immutative intransitives, PPs of transitive and mutative intransitive verbs always embody a patient situation. The problem, then, is why some patient situations seem to be unsuitable to form a category with a noun. Below, we argue that, in these cases, the patient situation is insufficiently reconstructable or insufficiently relevant. The explanation of APP restrictions with mutatively used movement verbs lies in the agent role of the subject referent, which causes the immutative counterpart of these verbs to come into play