I'm reading Biber's Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. At some point the author lists families of words, which are: lexical words, function words and inserts. And then, after the unit devoted to function words he describes a 'special classes of words', among them single-word classes, wh-words, numerals and interjection. I'm just starting my adventure with studying English grammar thus I'd like to know whether these two notions are one and the same thing.
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I'm guessing that inserts are a strictly broader class than interjections. (So all interjections are inserts, but not vice versa.) Just guessing.– ŘídícíOct 2, 2016 at 16:36
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@Keep these mind: More recently, interjections have been variously identified as adverbs (the catch-all category), pragmatic particles, discourse markers, and single-word clauses. Others have characterized interjections as pragmatic noises, response cries, reaction signals, expressives, inserts, and evincives. The implication of that is that "inserts" are a subset of "interjections", not vice-versa.– FumbleFingersOct 2, 2016 at 16:44
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1...there's also Biber et al. use the cover term insert because interjections "do not form an integral part of a syntactic structure".– FumbleFingersOct 2, 2016 at 16:47
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@FumbleFingers The first seems, uhm, wrong. The second quote, eh, supports my guess ("cover term").– ŘídícíOct 2, 2016 at 16:50
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2Biber et al study gigantic linguistic archives via computer and annotate the actual patterns that occur. Often they find that -- as here -- resort to traditional terminology complicates their description, so they introduce and define their own terminology instead. They have the data; they can do that. Description comes after data, not before.– John LawlerOct 2, 2016 at 17:24
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