Oh and ah as the markers of affective-relevance awareness

Abstract

　An utterance conveys not only the speaker’s current thought as information but also the concomitant emotion as an expression. Emotives are the forms of designating the distinctive manners of enveloping states of affairs in affective dimensions in sync with intonation and voice quality along with facial expressions and gestures. The present article argues that the emotives oh and ah are the markers which serve to make it manifest that the speaker is aware and simultaneously making the addressee aware that the state of affairs has noteworthy affective contextual significance. Whenever the import of an utterance is felt to be particularly meaningful or impressive, some sort of emotion is very likely to emerge. Keeping the speaker’s fleeting emotional states transparent via, among other emotives, oh and ah surely helps achieve close psychological ties between the participants. Oh and ah are associated with their own characteristic shades of feelings: specifically, oh with impulsive or responsive (thus dynamic) feelings, while ah with the static feelings of being absorbed in or savoring an emotion. Ah in addition typically involves underlying background assumptions comprising a variety of socio-cultural ideas and the interactants’ shared knowledge. Equally worth noticing is that oh and ah distinguish manners of saying by attributing to oh ‘lively’ enthusiasm against ah, which implicates ‘contented’ reflection. Furthermore, in everyday talk exchanges oh is sensitive to the cause of awareness related to a) the opening of a discourse, b) intensification, c) prominent informativeness of the interlocutor’s utterance, d) the speaker’s shift of cognitive state, e) a cognitive gap between the participants, or f) anomaly in the interlocutor’s utterance, whereas ah mirrors awareness of an emerging state of affairs (as in the fulfillment of understanding or empathy with a speech situation) or of the relevance to a background assumption. Focusing on the inherent subjectivity of oh and ah, this article departs sharply from the previous studies typified by the information management theory and the proposal of a change of cognitive state, whose main concern has been the nonaffective mechanisms of verbal interactions.