On the Pragmatics of Interjections in Parliamentary Interruptions

Abstract

Interruptions in parliamentary debates are a powerful way of disturbing the speech of the legitimate speaker while conveying ideas, mostly in a brief form. Based on a corpus of eighteen parliamentary debates at the German Bundestag between 1998 and 2015, this article intends to offer a renewed perspective on interruptions by conducting research on a particular form of interruption which has so far drawn little attention: interjections. In comparison with other types of interruptions, interjections play a special part in parliamentary encounters, since they are syntactically autonomous and semantically complete communicative events. This paper aims at a better understanding of interjections in a formal environment where various levels of addressees are at stake. Integrating the addressee’s point of view is crucial in order to understand the proper interactive nature of interjections and how the participants contextually actualise their semantic value according to the pragmatic context. Despite their construed nature, interjections work as signals towards the addressees and target recipients of parliamentary talk and therefore contribute to the staging of a dialogue at the German Bundestag.