All sixteen Spanish dialogs were also marked up to indicate the boundaries of exclamations and interjections, taking roughly twenty minutes each once operational definitions for the two categories were established. The sixteen English translations of these dialogs were also marked up. In regard to the 20 Spanish texts and their translations, no examples of either category were found although, if parenthetical expressions are identified as interjections, then several examples were encountered. Assuming that this is not the case, however, since there were no examples of either category found, the Spanish texts and their translation can, by default, be regarded as marked up.
The operational definition of exclamation that we followed is ``any expression used to communicate a strong subjective attitude toward some individual, situation or event''. For example, in response to one participant's comment that they do not like a particular church which has been suggested as a last resort for meeting, the second participant says:
ay por dios...
good heavens...
expressing her frustration at the lack of cooperativeness on the part of her conversational partner. While no subcategories were distinguished for the comparison, it appears that one useful classification might be based on the type of attitude (e.g., surprise, disgust, amusement, and so on) expressed. A second possible classification might be on the basis of whether they have semantic content as well as subjective value. That is, whereas an expression such as ``híjola'' (jeez) appears to have pure subjective value, an expression such as ``felicidades'' (congratulations) appears to have both subjective value and semantic content.
In the case of interjections, the operational definition we have followed is ``any expression uttered in the course of uttering some other expression which contributed to a different level of discourse''. For example, if in the course of an utterance related to some on-going utterance sequence, the speaker, realizing that someone has left whom he or she had wanted to talk to, suddenly utters ``dios'' (oh darn), the utterance is counted as an interjection. The following is an example taken from the corpus.
nos podemos juntar entre las ... yo no sé ...
we can meet between ... I don't know
tres a las cuatro.
three and four.
As in the prior example, it is not clear that such expressions are unrelated to the on-going utterance sequence, and it is possible that parentheticals, in general, should be identified as interjections. In any case there were too few examples in the corpus to establish subcategories.
In terms of the quantitative results, in the 6 dialogs we found 8 exclamations and only 2 interjections, that is, on average, about .012 of the utterances contained exclamations and about .003 contained interjections. In the 11 news articles we found no exclamations nor interjections were found. Thus, while these are categories of expressions that appear in dialogs and do not appear in texts, they are sufficiently infrequent to warrant much concern.