The Interjection ‘Aiyo’ in Taiwan Mandarin

There are two prominent approaches to interjections, one is based on semantic theory and the other is informed by sociolinguistics. This study focuses on the Taiwan Mandarin interjection aiyo and attempts to show how both these two approaches are workable when conducting research on interjections. The data used was collected from the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. We analyze 67 examples, presenting 11 types of interjectory use of aiyo. They are categorized into 5 main categories: (1) for example, showing negative proposition, (2) showing positive proposition, (3) mitigating the proposition, (4) mocking the proposition, and (5) functioning as an attention getter. These five categories give sense to what Wharton (2003) proposed as “higher-level explicature”, by pointing in the general direction in which relevance should be sought, together with the context, the speakers and the hearers know exactly the meaning of the utterance. Our hypothesis appears confirmed by the results.