Emotive interjections of joy and surprise in different Khanty dialects

The article aims to specify emotive interjections of joy and pleasant surprise in the Khanty language and to particularize their semantics and functioning patterns in various dialects of Khanty – Eastern and Northern. 100 contexts with the interjections were selected by continuous sampling from folklore (fairy tales and short stories) and casual oral speech records obtained during field expeditions. In the course of study, etymological analysis, contextual analysis and comparative method were used. As a result, 75 interjections of joy and pleasant surprise were identified with 40 of them baring the meaning of joy, delight and admiration (35 original Khanty and 5 borrowings) and 35 (original Khanty) baring the meaning of pleasant surprise. Borrowed interjections were found in all studied dialects of modern Khanty mostly in written sources. It turned out that it was not always easy to determine the semantics of the interjections as far as depending on the context, one and the same interjection could express various shades of an emotion or even different emotions. It was also discovered that the interjections expressing pleasant surprise could be characterized by different valency. More than 20 analyzed interjections are still not included in the existing Khanty dictionaries.