Interjections
Interjections are a special syntactical category of words.
Most words exist as components of complex sentences, playing specific syntactical roles within the syntactical structure of those sentences.
Interjections, on the other hand, are more-or-less complete sentences in themselves.
When you speak a word that is an interjection, you have expressed the full meaning of what you intended to say.
There may of course be more that needs to be said – but that will usually involve starting a new separate sentence.
For example:
Wow!
That is an amazing dress!
Felix Ameka proposed a basic classification of interjections into three classes:
- expressive, with focus on the speaker's state
- conative, with emphasis on the speaker's wishes
- phatic, which has to do with the establishment of contact
(as taken from his paper Interjections: The universal yet neglected part of speech)
I have proposed that protomusic, the ancestor of music, existed as a form of communication, which communicated the following:
- The existence of new information
- That new information had some emotional significance
- The protomusical communication did not include any specific details of the new information.
"New" information was new with respect to the "speaker" of the protomusical utterance.
It could be one of:
- The speaker observed something
- The speaker realised that something is true
(In a modern context we would also include:
- Someone told the speaker something
However, in the context of protomusic, word-based language did not yet exist, and there did not exist any means for one individual to "tell" something to another individual.)
Comparing it to Ameka's classification, this proposed meaning of protomusic utterances would have been equivalent to a subset of interjections in the first class, ie expressive interjections.
In other words, the function of protomusic was primarily to reveal something about the state of the speaker's mind, and there was no intention to actively engage in any specific type of on-going interaction with any listeners. It was entirely up to listeners to take account of what was being revealed about the protomusical speaker's state of mind, and to act or not act on that information as they saw fit. (For example, assuming that a speaker might have spoken a protomusical utterance because they had just seen something emotionally significant, listeners might pay extra attention to their immediate situation to try and figure out what that something was.)
Protomusic and the Evolution of Verbal Interjections
Given this proposed equivalence between the meaning of protomusic and modern verbal interjections, one might assume that I am proposing that verbal interjections evolved from protomusic.
However, based on my previously developed hypotheses about how protomusic was related to the evolution of word-based language, I would conclude that the relation between the evolution of protomusic and the evolution of verbal interjections was somewhat more round-about.
In particular, the sequence of steps in the evolution of verbal interjections was probably as follows:
- Protomusic evolved as a means of communicating the existence of new information with emotional significance, and protomusical utterances did not include any specific details of that new information.
- Words evolved as a supplement to protomusic, providing hints about the details of the relevant information.
- Words evolved complex syntax, which eventually made it possible for the words themselves to express the full content of the new information.
- Words further evolved to the point where they could communicate information where protomusical meaning was not necessarily relevant – that is, words could express information which was not necessarily new (to the speaker), and they could express information that might not have any immediate emotional significance.
- A consequence of this further evolution of the word-based component of communicative language was that protomusic ceased to be a useful or necessary component of pragmatic communication, and language reached something close to its modern form, consisting almost entirely of sentences constructed from sequences of words.
- However there were still situations where it was desirable to communicate the meanings that protomusic previously communicated.
- As a result, a new type of word evolved to fill the gap resulting from the disappearance of protomusic, and those words are what we now call interjections (or more specifically, expressive interjections).
Vocalisation: Protomusic vs Verbal Interjection
There is another reason to suppose that verbal interjections did not evolve directly from protomusic, even though, according to my hypotheses, they performed a similar function.
This is that the actual vocal form of the two things was quite different.
Interjections are typically vocalised as words that are constructed in the same way as other "normal" (syntactical) words, for example, in a language like English, as a sequence of consonant and vowel sounds.
Whereas protomusic, in its original form, mostly likely expressed its meaning via a sudden change in a repetitive vocalisation that the "speaking" individual was already uttering before they became aware of the new emotionally significant information, where that change was triggered by the new information, and where listeners perceived that change and determined (as best they could), the implied meaning of it.
It follows from this that the hypothesis does not tell us anything about how the specific form of verbal interjections evolved.
However, it does tentatively explain the syntactical simplicity of interjections as de facto complete sentences.
That is, protomusic did not contain the syntactical complexity of word-based language, and therefore, after syntactically complex word-based language rendered protomusic irrelevant, the words which then evolved to perform the previous function of protomusic also did not require any syntactical complexity.
(It can be observed that music has a type of syntactical complexity that seems similar to that of word-based language. However the "meaning" of music is not constructed from the meaning of its syntactial components in any manner analogous to how the meaning of sentences is constructed form the meanings of the individual words. And it can also be observed that emotion is expressed within music by the occurrence of change relative to prior repetition, in a manner that does not occur at all in word-based language.)