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Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) assumes that interjections’ meaning is principally conceptual (descriptive). However, the expressive character of immediate interjections requires the rejection of any conceptualist approach to their meaning. When compared with vocabulary for which a conceptual account is most plausible, immediate uses of interjections appear to fail a basic requirement on the postulation of conceptual meaning.
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Nick Riemer (2013) studied this question.
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