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. – Řídící Oct 02 '16 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. – FumbleFingers Oct 02 '16 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".* – FumbleFingers Oct 02 '16 at 16:47
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@FumbleFingers The first seems, uhm, wrong. The second quote, eh, supports my guess ("cover term"). – Řídící Oct 02 '16 at 16:50
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@Keep these mind: It's hardly a cut & dried distinction. I'm not a linguist, but a couple of minutes on Google give me the impression that *insert* is really just a new term introduced by "Biber et al" less than 20 years ago. It may not be all that widely recognised (yet, or ever). – FumbleFingers Oct 02 '16 at 16:58
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The few bits that I found (on Google) seem to suggest that vocative expressions, FumbleFingers, are supposedly inserts too. @FumbleFingers I may be wrong. – Řídící Oct 02 '16 at 17:03
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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 Lawler Oct 02 '16 at 17:24
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@John: I don't recall you referring to interjections and/or inserts often if ever, but I think I've picked up *discourse marker* mainly from you. Do you think of interjection / insert as subcategories within discourse marker, or are they just not particularly useful classifications? – FumbleFingers Oct 02 '16 at 18:30
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I don't really pay attention to those very much, and thus have no particular use for either term, but I would use them differently if I had to. They are not terms in the same system. – John Lawler Oct 02 '16 at 18:36