“Oh, no! Not on Wednesday! On Thursday!”: interjection in the context of speech disfluency

The subject of the study is a special class of uses of the Russian interjection OY, namely, uses in the context of speech disfluencies.The study is based on data from three corpora-the oral and the multimedia (MURO) subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus and the pilot version of the corpus of oral personal stories "What I saw".The main types of speech disfluencies in the context of which speakers resort to using the interjection OY, the structure of constructions with OY, as well as the features of their phonetic-segmental and suprasegmental-implementation are investigated.From a quantitative point of view, a comparison of the use of OY in oral public and oral non-public speech is carried out.It is shown that although OY in oral non-public speech occurs, as could be expected, many times more often, the proportion of OY as a marker of a speech disfluency in relation to the total number of uses of OY is almost the same in public and non-public varieties of oral speech.These quantitative data suggest that the general distribution of the use of OY and the distribution of OY as a marker of speech disfluency are not regulated by the same factors.The general distribution is associated with the degree of spontaneity and publicity of speech: interjections as exclamatory discursive markers become more appropriate when the speaker is not constrained by disciplinary guidelines and can allow himself to express emotions and give assessments more freely.And the distribution of OY as a marker of speech disfluency is also associated with the density of speech disfluencies themselves.Of course, this density varies among individual speakers, but at the same time it largely depends on the general principles regulating the generation of unprepared discourse.