Interjections are effective tools for expressing instantaneous emotions, feelings, pain, surprise, sadness, complaints, states of uncertainty or indecision, or many other common feelings and emotions. They are also effective at conveying personal attitudes and stances and can provide important clues in terms of research on the origin and evolution of human language. Unlike lexical elements, interjections do not directly contain absolute meaningful content or semantic components. In this respect, although interjections cannot be absolutely placed along any of the axes in the linguistic cline of meaning and function, even if differentiations are observed in terms of various subcategories or types, one can still argue that interjections have a paralinguistic or language-supportive metafunction because of how they carry an auxiliary quality that makes grammatical structures more effective in conveying what the speaker feels or thinks or any other emotional or spiritual state to the receiver. While interjections positioned at the secondary level in Turkish such as yazık ‘pity’ is directly related to a coded and defined lexical item and partially contains some semantic content, interjections such as ahh or öff are in contrast far removed from having any direct semantic or lexical content. Depending on the context, this latter type of interjection is focused on expressing a feeling of physical pain, a sigh, boredom, anger, or some other emotion or emotional value, usually involuntarily, as well as on creating these values in the receiver in most cases. Therefore, some interjections may be shaped by the secondary functioning of certain lexical elements, and situations for using an interjection may also arise as a result of elements belonging to other lexical classes that were previously encoded in the language (i.e., temporary context-based interjections). Such interjections can be considered secondary interjections. Meanwhile, interjections that are shaped independently of existing lexical elements and that are formed involuntarily in most cases and unable to be evaluated in a different category can be considered primary interjections. Secondary interjections have a pragmatic function and a motive for conveying personal feelings, emotions, or attitudes to the listener rather than some original semantic or syntactic content. Interjections such as these can start and end a discourse on their own.

In line with the presented information, the present study will touch upon the general and inclusive features of the category of interjections, as these have been neglected both in Turkish grammar as well as in linguistic studies conducted at a university level. Among the primary interjections that can be defined as paralinguistic, the interjection is shaped by the dental-palatal snapping sound and represented by different spellings such as , <çıh> or <çık>. It is defined in the Güncel Türkçe Sözlük [Up-to-Date Turkish Dictionary] (GTS, 2023) as “a word used in the sense of ‘no’ or ‘no way’” and will be analyzed here in depth. Because this interjection is mostly realized in the moment in spoken language, the examples will be based more on personal observations and experiences, and the given examples will be designed accordingly. Meanwhile, utilizing a corpus as a data source will be practically impossible as only a limited number of spoken texts are found in Turkish, which is far from comprehensive. These are also mostly based on written texts. Even if speech-based corpora such as the Spoken Turkish Corpus (std.metu.edu.tr) had been developed, these corpora being mostly based on recordings of controlled radio or television programs would therefore rarely contain an interjection such as . Because this interjection is more likely to occur in closed, bilateral conversations or dialogue involving emotions, moods, personal attitudes, and posturing, it is unlikely to appear in any recorded conversation or dialogue. Therefore, the data sources constituting the basis of the study are quite limited. For all these reasons, the data universe of the study will involve examples of usage that can be witnessed through personal observation or that are mostly idealized.

The study’s findings reveal that the interjection is not only used in the sense of “no” and has a negation function, but also has positive and neutral functions. This interjection covers a wide range of functions such as surprise, anger, calling out to someone, and impatience. Although the paralinguistic interjection contains universal codes, it is only fully understood when the recipient has well-established cultural background knowledge and codes and can analyze and interpret the relevant codes cognitively. The body movements, gestures, and mimics that occur in conjunction with this interjection also carry cultural codes and local traces that have been passed down from generation to generation. Therefore, the full transmission of this interjection between the speaker and the listener and the full understanding of its contextual functions depend on shared cultural codes and background knowledge. Thus, the power of discourse to convey emotion and thought will become even more effective with these paralinguistic and extra-linguistic tools involving the interjection and the body movements, gestures, and facial expressions that accompany its use.